It lets me write less JS
One of the most common arguments I hear for using large libraries in production code is…
It lets me write less JS.
That’s some funny math.
Shipping megabytes of JavaScript to save kilobytes of JavaScript just doesn’t add up. Adding hundreds or thousands of dependencies so that you can write a few less lines of code is a bad tradeoff. So is locking your entire site or app into a library indefinitely.
I’m not saying developer ergonomics and ease of authoring code don’t matter. They do.
But we’ve grossly over-indexed them to the expensive of things like resilience, the maintainability of our code base, and the experience of the people who actually use the things we build.