What Do You Mean I Can't Define Hooks For Everything

Found in the wild depths of npm: a package called "react-buttplug" that connects React to... well, exactly what you think. The description "Here there be WASM" is the cherry on top of this cursed sundae. The fact that someone spent actual development hours creating a React provider for Buttplug.io (a real "intimate hardware" API) and then published it with that name is peak developer humor. Five years later and zero dependents - shocking absolutely no one. This is what happens when you tell developers "you can build anything" without adding "but please don't."

The seductive whisper of "come under the blankets, I have something to show you" takes a hilarious turn when instead of anything romantic, it's just a developer proudly displaying their bloated node_modules folder with 113,652 items taking up 120GB of precious disk space. Nothing says "I'm a JavaScript developer" quite like needing an entire hard drive just to import left-pad. The modern equivalent of "I swear this never happened before" is explaining to your PM why installing a simple date picker requires downloading half the internet.

The web development circle of life in all its painful glory. Thirty years of "innovation" and what do we have to show for it? A new framework every Tuesday designed to fix the problems created by last Thursday's framework. Meanwhile, jQuery—that ancient relic we've been trying to kill since Obama's first term—is still powering most of the internet like some unkillable cockroach after a nuclear apocalypse. The punchline isn't even the timeline of increasingly niche frameworks; it's that after all our architectural patterns, virtual DOMs, and reactive state management, we've somehow ended up exactly where we started. It's not progress; it's just fashion with semicolons.

Ah yes, the classic "let's ditch the framework" presentation that conveniently forgets to mention they also fired half their users. Sure, your TTI improved by 50% when nobody's using your app anymore! Next slide: "By replacing our database with a text file, we saw a 99% reduction in storage costs!" The JavaScript pendulum swings once again—React is bloated! Vanilla JS is king! Until next quarter when they'll discover this amazing new framework called *checks notes* Angular.

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*

Sometimes I wonder if returning to monke would be easier than debugging that React component for the 17th time. The sweet bliss of ignorance—no JavaScript frameworks, no variable scope issues, just vibing with the squad and hunting for ants. The ultimate escape from dependency hell. Maybe those chimps are onto something...