>> I've touched some vue.js too, but I just hate the direction everything is going.

I've had the exact same thoughts. For a long time, I was a big VueJS fan because of its simplicity and I could build really nice clean and fast apps without a bundler. When your app has few dependencies, bundling is overkill. For some personal projects, I didn't even bundle for production; still, it loaded faster and the user experience felt smoother than the vast majority of web applications that we have today.

Now I can see VueJS is moving towards TypeScript and forced bundling. It's beyond frustrating. It's refreshing to read comments like above because so few people are experienced enough to see it as a problem. There was a period in front end development a bit less than a decade ago when it felt like things where always getting better every year; bundlers were only used for production for some projects and HTTP2 was going to allow us to push scripts to the browser so that we wouldn't even need to bundle for production... The future was bright. Then Webpack came along and it became crazy popular, then suddenly people started bundling during development? WTF! Then CoffeeScript came along, added essentially no value at all but people were crazy about it, then transpiling and bundling during development became completely normal. I never thought I'd live to see the day that people would be debugging machine-mangled code. All the work that had been done before since the invention of the computer was about making machine code more readable for humans so this was a shocking reversal of progress.

Most younger people think that bundling is normal... Always existing kind of thing. They don't realize that bundling and transpilation is a massive hack that was meant to be temporary and really should never have existed.

Very experienced engineers from previous generations invested a lot of time and effort into making fast interpreters for dynamic languages like JavaScript so that people didn't have to wait for code to compile. I remember watching interviews with Google Engineers who worked on V8 thinking to myself how great it was that they were able to get interpreted JavaScript to almost match the performance of compiled languages like Java; that was a huge achievement. Waiting for the code to compile was considered a major problem back then; especially for front end web development. Let's face it, the underlying problems of front end development are trivial, but the ecosystem itself has turned simple problems into highly complex ones.

If you've used programming languages like C/C++ where you have to link static and dynamic libraries together, the value of a fast interpreted language is very clear and JavaScript fits the use case quite well. Front end development was never rocket science though it seems to be getting there.

Now people added a massive, highly complex and poorly thought out bundling and transpilation layer between the efficient browser engine and their web apps which essentially takes away all the value and efficiency that had been thoughtfully and painstakingly added to all the layers underneath since the dawn of time.

Then people start complaining about how bloated and bulky and difficult software development is, but before we can all realize that the answer is to throw out all the unnecessary crap that was added on top, some genius will come along out of nowhere with hot new technology which will add even more crap on top and which gives the illusion of solving the problems that people were complaining about but it will in fact cause new, even worse problems... and the cycle of bloat and disappointment will continue.

But at least we will all have more jobs... For a while.

I swear if this industry gets any more retarded, they'll be able to replace us with monkeys. Some genius with an MBA will figure out that same productivity with lower costs = higher profits.