I still remember doing a PoC for an end-to-end secure messaging app with web support, around 3 years back. It was written in plain JS with jquery and one or two libs for crypto bolted on. Simple, easy, but not very maintenance friendly written. Took around 2000 lines all in all. One of four clients (Android, iOS and a bot framework in Scala&#x2F;Java).<p>Then the web-boys came in to rewrite my... well, contraption. In came Grunt, NPM, Angular, some CSS framework, unit testing. Much more, but I forgot the names of all of it, you know the drill. I have to admit, looking at each of these components independently, one could hardly argue with their usefulness, but together they buried a relatively simple and elegant messaging system in tons and tons of incoherent, unmaintained, inextensible and incompatible (with websockets at the time) stuff.<p>The line-count went up, of course, easily to 15000 lines. I couldn&#x27;t understand my own designs anymore, since they got spread out over dozens different files. Refactoring became almost impossible. The web-boys however, didn&#x27;t understand asynchronous messaging, cryptography and eventual consistency very well and we lost each other, making a babylonian tower, far away from our original goals.<p>The quality of your solution is not in your libraries, or your frameworks, instead it&#x27;s in being fluent bottom-up before grabbing a library or two. You&#x27;ll see you often don&#x27;t even need them.<p>(edit: small typos, edit2: please explain down-votes, I&#x27;d like to know and be happy to answer any questions)