Some of the times. What I am bitching about is that I can't get around NPM/Bower and other bullshit, I have to use it for a lot of these libs, regardless of me needing them.
I am the only one who should judge what are the best practices for the project I am working on, not some clueless Javascript hacker (cheap shot I know). What I'm complaining about is that front end "developers" seem to all be unaware of a few staple principle of software engineering: keep it simple and right tool for right job. I've used NPM, Bower, Gulp, and others, when it was needed but from over a decade of experience in the web I can assure you that 90% of the time, it's superfluous.
It generates developers who don't know how their own code works or interact, and who for the major part end up over engineering everything they touch for no goddamn reason.
Plus I always end up spending more time dealing with those stupid tools than coding, and if Java taught me anything it's that this is the clear sign of a very ill and insane dev culture.
> What I am bitching about is that I can't get around NPM/Bower and other bullshit, I have to use it for a lot of these libs, regardless of me needing them.
You do realize that downloading the CSS/JS for these libs is trivial, nothing is forcing you to use Bower/NPM/<insert lib management tool here>.
I've often wondered why this sort of overengineering, excess, and heavy "preaching" of "best practices" is more prevalent in some software ecosystems than others; the best hypothesis I can come up with is that it happens because the barrier to entry is low and the problems to be solved are easy, which encourages people to add complexity until it's not. Furthermore, the simplicity causes opportunities for something like a religion to develop: you don't have to think, just believe and follow. It's cargo-cult. Some fact that worked for someone gets parroted as "best practice" and then, despite how suboptimal it could be for them, others pick it up and think it's the "best" solution, and it works for them, propagating the belief. There's little questioning, because those who believe don't themselves actually understand enough to.
have you ever taken on a code base with thousands of lines of copy pasta code?
tried to update or workout dependencies/conflicts when the dude before you just dumped a bunch of jquery plugins (some hacked) in a directory?
give me a package.json any day! mmmm.. structured data.. nom nom nom