From CSS Hell To JavaScript Purgatory

The five stages of beginner developer delusion, perfectly captured in skeletal form. It starts with innocent enthusiasm, quickly escalates to "I'm learning React to learn JavaScript" (which is like saying "I'm learning to fly a Boeing 747 to understand gravity"), then rapidly descends into the fever dream of building Netflix clones with ChatGPT after 72 hours of coding. By stage four, our protagonist is planning an AI SaaS empire after a week of copy-pasting Stack Overflow answers. The final transformation into a complete skeleton represents the ultimate delusion: dropping engineering college for a bootcamp that "guarantees" job offers. Senior developers watching this evolution: *sips coffee in traumatized silence*

Just another Tuesday, paddling through the 1.3 million packages on NPM, hoping to find that magical dependency that won't introduce 300 vulnerabilities or break your entire project next week. The search continues through the endless sea of abandoned projects, cryptominers, and that one package with decent documentation but hasn't been updated since 2017. Keep rowing.

First you learn HTML. Cool. Then JavaScript. Nice. Then you discover you can put JavaScript inside HTML with <script> tags. Wait what? Then you're told about EJS where you write JavaScript inside HTML... but differently? And just when your brain is about to recover, JSX comes along and says "how about writing HTML inside your JavaScript?" The circle of confusion is now complete. No wonder that cat looks like it's questioning its entire existence. The modern web stack isn't a technology—it's a psychological experiment to see how much recursive madness developers will tolerate before they switch to gardening as a career.

The eternal irony of web development—we can send rovers to Mars, build AI that beats humans at chess, and create virtual worlds... but centering a div? That's where humanity draws the line. The meme perfectly captures the absurdity that something seemingly so simple has remained one of frontend's most notorious headaches. Even with flex, grid, and countless Stack Overflow answers, we still circle that code button in frustration wondering why our perfectly crafted CSS betrays us. It's like needing a PhD just to put something in the middle of the screen.

Look at this poor dev crawling desperately toward their framework lifelines. The modern web developer's equivalent of withdrawal symptoms. "Just one more component library, I swear I can quit Angular anytime!" Remember when we built websites with just HTML, CSS, and vanilla JS? No dependency hell, no 500MB node_modules folder, no "npm audit fix" nightmares. Those were simpler times. Now we've created generations of devs who break into cold sweats at the thought of writing a querySelector instead of using their precious framework's state management. The irony is we've come full circle - the "revolutionary" solutions all eventually try to mimic the simplicity we abandoned in the first place. Yet here we are, crawling back to our framework overlords because god forbid we handle DOM updates manually.

Ah, the elusive "Vibe Code Cleanup Specialist" – the job title nobody asked for but suddenly everyone has on LinkedIn! What started as a joke has clearly reached pandemic proportions. It's like watching evolution happen in real-time, except instead of developing opposable thumbs, developers are developing increasingly nebulous job titles. From Finland to Colombia, these brave pioneers are fighting the good fight against... bad vibes in your codebase? Is this what happens when HR and engineering have one too many happy hours together? Next week they'll be "Quantum Refactoring Shamans" and "Legacy Code Exorcists." Remember when we just called ourselves "developers" and cried silently into our keyboards? Simpler times.