As atomic points, I agree. Polyfills aren't rocket science. If the browser API is not defined, the use the polyfill function (at least, that's how most work, but then there's ponyfills, which don't pollute the global scope).
But front-end development of complex applications isn't done in a vacuum by one person. It's done by multiple teams, possibly distributed across different physical locations.
As an architect, what is your polyfill story? Does each team ship ES Modules that are later compiled by Webpack? Is each team responsible for loading their own? It's probably more efficient to handle it globally --knowing what all teams need at once as part of a build step-- to prevent duplicative loading of the same polyfill by 5 different teams.
It gets nuanced quick. Nobody can master all these concepts --and reasonable ways of managing them in distributed team environments-- in a few weeks.
And if you think JavaScript is "simple", I encourage reading "You Don't Know JS". What does "this" mean, in JavaScript? I could ask a handful of questions from the multitude of sections in this book, and people writing JavaScript for years wouldn't be able to answer all of them. React and Angular are such a thin slice of the overall problem. Even simple projects will require a dozen or so more NPM packages until you have something remotely useful.
> I could ask a handful of questions from the multitude of sections in this book, and people writing JavaScript for years wouldn't be able to answer all of them.
I think this might prove my point. There's tons of great Javascript engineers out there, who are consistently delivering business value, who actually aren't even that knowleadgable about all the details inside Javascript.
Most of the variance in quality between software engineers has to do with technology-agnostic skills rather than stack-specific knowledge. They architect well-designed, modular systems. They communicate with stakeholders. They write robust, readable, testable code. Their documentation is understandable and comprehensive. They're thoughtful about naming things. They can large codebases and keep complexity contained. They understand performance tradeoffs, and anticipate bottlenecks before they occur.
Very little of that has to do with stack-specific knowledge. A developer who does all of the above, but doesn't know all the ins-and-outs of the JS coercion model, is going to be much more productive on almost all practical business problems.
The most important skill usually isn't knowing every single detail of your underlying ecosystem. It's knowing enough about its overarching landscape to be aware of the things you don't know. As long as you know how to ask the right questions and where the limits of your knowledge lies.
But front-end development of complex applications isn't done in a vacuum by one person. It's done by multiple teams, possibly distributed across different physical locations.
As an architect, what is your polyfill story? Does each team ship ES Modules that are later compiled by Webpack? Is each team responsible for loading their own? It's probably more efficient to handle it globally --knowing what all teams need at once as part of a build step-- to prevent duplicative loading of the same polyfill by 5 different teams.
It gets nuanced quick. Nobody can master all these concepts --and reasonable ways of managing them in distributed team environments-- in a few weeks.
And if you think JavaScript is "simple", I encourage reading "You Don't Know JS". What does "this" mean, in JavaScript? I could ask a handful of questions from the multitude of sections in this book, and people writing JavaScript for years wouldn't be able to answer all of them. React and Angular are such a thin slice of the overall problem. Even simple projects will require a dozen or so more NPM packages until you have something remotely useful.