After years of chasing the latest frameworks and libraries, I made a deliberate choice to simplify. Fewer dependencies, less abstraction, more control. The result has been surprisingly liberating.
The modern web ecosystem encourages complexity. Every problem has a package, every pattern has a framework. But at some point, the overhead of managing all those moving parts starts to outweigh the benefits.
What Changed
I replaced my React SPA with server-rendered HTML and a sprinkle of vanilla JS. I dropped my ORM in favor of raw SQL. I traded Kubernetes for a single VPS with a deploy script. The apps still work. They are faster. And I actually understand every line of my infrastructure.
This is not advice for everyone. Large teams need different tools than solo developers. But if you have been feeling the weight of your stack, it might be worth questioning what is truly necessary.