From CSS Hell To JavaScript Purgatory

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.

Left panel: A shooter with perfect form, deadly precision, and an arsenal of modern frontend frameworks and tools that have revolutionized web development over the last decade. Right panel: The guy who still uses jQuery in 2024 and somehow keeps hitting the target anyway. The web development equivalent of bringing a musket to a laser gun fight and still managing to take down the enemy. Respect.

Two cats staring at a laptop screen is the perfect metaphor for what happens when leadership tries to center a div. They'll spend hours looking at the screen, trying different combinations of margin: auto , display: flex , and justify-content: center before eventually giving up and using absolute positioning with negative margins. Because nothing says "I'm a professional" like using CSS hacks that will break the second someone resizes the window. Frontend development: where even the simplest tasks make you question your career choices.

The perfect embodiment of visiting r/ProgrammerHumor expecting to find sophisticated web development jokes, only to discover it's 90% "CSS bad" and "JavaScript weird" posts. That cat's face captures the exact moment of realization that what passes for "web dev humor" is just the same recycled jokes about centering divs and callback hell. The disappointment is immeasurable and my day is ruined.

THE ABSOLUTE HORROR of returning to the prehistoric coding wasteland! After years of being coddled by frameworks with their fancy useEffect, useState, and useWhateverYouWant hooks, you're suddenly thrust back into the Stone Age of web development. It's like being forced to hunt your own food after living at a 5-star resort! Your fingers, once dancing gracefully across custom hooks, now trembling as they type out raw JavaScript like some kind of ANIMAL. The AUDACITY of having to manually manage DOM updates! The INDIGNITY of writing more than three lines of code to handle a simple state change! I'm getting heart palpitations just THINKING about it! 💀

The ultimate developer crossroads: take the left path and risk your entire codebase exploding from ancient vulnerabilities in packages you haven't touched since 2019, or take the right path and watch your build fail spectacularly because some genius decided to push breaking changes in a minor version update. The left side gives you React2Shell vibes—probably running on dependencies so old they remember when jQuery was cool. The right side? Shai-Hulud, the giant sandworm from Dune, representing the chaos that emerges when you run npm update and suddenly 47 things break in production. Both paths lead to pain. Pick your poison: security nightmares or spending your Friday evening debugging why your app suddenly can't find module 'left-pad'.