Chasing Frameworks
The early years of React were quite fun. There wasn't a lot of pre-built anything so you had to get your hands dirty with the basics. HTML and CSS were much less abstracted away. I found myself crafting every single component. On top of that, tools like webpack were dominating the landscape and I spent more time than necessary trying to work around its (sigh) clunky API. Looking back I wish I had more focus on getting a deeper understanding of what webpack, for example, was trying to solve. Thankfully I eventually did.
I went through a similar phase with gorilla/mux or go-chi/chi but before jumping into that, I did some grunt work. I built a small API and went through the pain. A lot of things built by these libraries clicked right away AFTER I did the work myself. This was more trivial than webpack but I did my best to avoid making the same mistakes. It gave me greater appreciation for the changes I mentioned yesterday with go 1.22.0. Being able to build powerful applications with very few dependencies just got a bit easier.
I understand the temptation to chase the latest and greatest framework, it's a great selling tool and something that can make you stand out as a candidate. As I rationalize this I'm not advocating against it, my experience with React is what landed me one of my early jobs. I want to push for learning the basics and not get too carried away learning the ins and outs of a framework forgetting what it's built with.
I got to thinking about this more lately as I played around with HTMX. With it I found myself digging into basic HTML which I haven't done in longer than I'd like. Being used to pre-built components inside and outside of work I lost touch with how HTML has evolved and everything you can achieve today without writing a line of JS. And don't let me get started with the many changes to CSS!
Thoughts
Frameworks come and go but they are still built on top of a given language. Knowing that inside out with its standard library or APIs will make you resilient to change. Go learn that framework if you need to, but do it judiciously.