Why don't more developers “use the platform”?

> If you search for “sticky positioning” on npm, there’s no package that says “just use CSS position: sticky, you dolt.”

Sure you use sticky till your component gets embedded inside a relative positioned container that you have no idea of where it is and why, and in complex codebases hardly you would rewrite the code for that container in order to not create regression. You then go with "use the platform" but javascript and you try using that horrible intersection observer api with an hack to make elements sticky, except it breaks immediately after on a corner case. You then reach out for a mature library.

Fuck off the platform i've been suffering for decades at this point fighting half complete apis and non well documented behaviour(no i wont read the humongous spec).

Everytime I used the platform(even recently with dialog) you almost immediately hit all the limitation.

The sooner we understand the platform abadoned us(and I also have a thinfoil hat theory about that) the soon we can have an api for drawing the heck we want(please dont mention canvas 2d) and an api for accesibility

I think the core issue is that the platform was bad for a long time so tools sprung up to make it more manageable (from jQuery all the way up to React). Now the platform is much better but it’s too late: a meaningful share of web developers don’t really understand the DOM.

I’ve interviewed an incredible number of junior developers that really don’t understand what’s going on beneath the React level at all. I blame a lot of this on code bootcamps that never even tried to explain the fundamentals. Over time they’ve collapsed and AI is going to overwhelm that basic level of understanding. But a lot of it still persists.

Because they learned top down instead of bottom up and are stuck

I developed a personal finance app "using the platform". The only JS is for push notifications (service worker registration). IMO the app still feels interactive, because modern CSS (e.g. toggle visibility on radio selection) and modern HTML features like dialog or details allows for some JS-like actions.

I mean a lot of it is just that many features that would have been nice to use decades ago have only just been implemented. For example, now we have some great modal options built into the browser in the form of the dialog element and popover attribute.

But for years, those didn't exist, and people got used to that. The former was added to certain browsers in 2022, and the latter was added in 2023-2025. If you've building modals with divs and JavaScript for years, it can take a bit to realise you don't need to do that anymore.

Eventually I suspect we'll be in a place where self-made solutions for common UI issues aren't needed anymore, but that's still sadly a way off, especially given how slow browsers have been to add fully customisable select elements and other form fields.

"use the platform" is a short version of "use the platform, it is good enough, trust me bro".

And the only reasonable answer is: "No."

since the author brought up the native <dialog>, developers chose custom implementations of dialogs because they want better accessibility, better focus management, better mobile and touch screen reader support, and more flexibility. adobe's implementation is far more robust and flexible compared to the native dialog, and it's hard to justify "use the platform" when it results in a strictly worse end result.

This misses the point completely for repeated arguments that make no sense "Its historical ...".

The reality is, you lose programmatic control when you use HTML directly. Its much easier to have Dialog component that reacts to its state, than to use the native dialog tag.

Friends don't let friends use npm

Same reason they don't use any platform. It's not as good as you think.

The platform sucks, still does, it's very simple. If you used native elements for everything, the users would complain that your website sucks ass.

This article misses the most crucial point.

Developers don't "use the platform" because all the building blocks for any component you can think of are already there. When "the platform" adds yet another set of not particularly pretty and badly configurable components, why would we use them? When there's tons of mature, deeply thought out, battle tested, cleanly abstracted components out there - especially when _those_ components are made of divs and layouting and CSS and are therefore malleable to the pixel instead of being made of magic browser pixie dust?

The Platform doesn't provide much tooling to aid development, it remains in isolation

Because the platform is too hard. The average person does not want to spend time figuring out how to get stuff to work. All the browser documentation is 1000 times nerdier than the average person wants. They want all this low level stuff abstracted away from them.

Even if you want to do it the nerdy way and bust out a text editor and start writing some HTML tags it all looks ugly out of the box. Browsers pushed everything for making websites onto 3rd party devs, so they shouldn't be surprised when they want to use 3rd party dev's stuff over the bad and confusing 1st party ones. The browser developers are in an ivory tower building a product that doesn't really care about web developers and their needs.

Seems from the article that this is more "why don't more REACT developers use the platform"?

I think it is largely because IMHO React is very much an "overlay" on top of (and inspite of) normal web standards and general beat practice (e.g. JSX throwing out decades of separation of concerns etc), leading to whole swathes of people who have basically only ever been "react developers" not generalist frontend engineers. They find the DOM APIs "icky" because it takes them out of the React lifecycle, mindset, and ecosystem etc.

Tldr, React and NPM are a pox on the world of frontend development and especially the JavaScript ecosystem. It's given JavaScript such a bad name, unfairly.

Still with AI basically nothing matters any more - no one sees the code any more.

JavaScript is an obvious skills gap.

Most people claim to be able to write JavaScript but what they really mean is that they can write only a few lines only if someone else provides them a template and if someone has made all the design decisions for them. It’s color by number. Then you can’t point any of this out because people become immediately defensive crying about how hard life is and how impossible writing original software is and on and on.

I got tired of working with all the liars and pretenders. The greatest challenge doing that work is the people, not the technology.

With AI you dont need React and pals. The best "stack" is just web components, with (if really required) some state manager (zustand, mobx etc) and optionally jsx if you want. Esbuild as a compiler. This is all browser native, very performant and will never get old (deprecated).

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Is it just me or does it feel like Anthropic and OpenAI (and probably others) are pumping harness engineering and the like to try and convince engineering organizations, or even entire companies, to "use the platform", and not meddle with software anymore?

This looks like a backend engineers take.

I must say it was worth reading , thanks for sharing your insights !!

There’s only one “the platform” but there were tons of competing libraries to do things like css, components, etc. The competitive landscape just produced better results. For me, Tailwind is nicer to use than regular CSS, and React is nicer to use than web components.

I’m not sure why people are talking about web components seeing as they aren’t mentioned in the article a single time.

Anyway, my complaint is about the troglodytes who refuse to learn CSS, and who promote troglodism in the form of tailwind and similar antipatterns.