I'd been complaining about these issues for years.

I kinda hate being vindicated years later, the time in between as an outsider kinda frustrates me.

I wish we had a more thoughtful, less packrat culture in programming. Fighting off the pushback is exhausting. It's not even worth bringing things up most of the time.

And as a disclaimer to those feeling tempted, I've got zero interest in debating this reality, water is wet.

It's the same in all human culture and politics. Every era's mainstream ridicules and dismisses those who criticize it as "extremists". But some of those extremists will one day be vindicated as being on the right side of history long before everyone else came around, and we will look back at that prior mainstream attitude and ask, "How could they be so blind?"

The important thing to keep in mind that we don't know which of today's counter-culture takes will end up winning (I don't say "being right" because cultural evolution is, like biological evolution, not teleological).

In other words, you had a belief, and in hindsight you were "vindicated". But there were many others who had equally strong beliefs that were not.

Their point of view seems kind of right to me in that they may be suboptimal design decisions in hindsight, but changing them now will break all existing integrators. If you're going to break everyone anyways, might as well switch to a whole different library, or alternatively give the redone version a new name so nobody assumes you can just upgrade it and it'll be fine.

The basis of my complaint is that some things are well designed, others are just nicely documented.

moment has a, to me, counterintuitive "hidden" type system that is a different-kind-of-menacing. In code I've had to review and maintain, the moment parts or more than often a soupy mess of the previous coders in combat with the nuanced hairy complexities of the library as opposed to straightforward execution of the api (compare to say, jquery, where setting all architectural disagreements aside, there's no substantial evidence of frequent "programmer struggle" in the codebases using it)

This leads to poor long-term maintainability as the code passes through many hands over the years.

If, after a year or two of average "blue collared" programmers touching a codebase it gets so convoluted that you generally need to abandon it, then fundamentally you are using poorly designed tools.

Again, we all only have our own personal lived experiences to make such assessments on, and I way too often end up "debating" what mostly amounts to my work history of parachuting in and rescuing code (it's a psychiatric problem I have) so the pessimistic aspects become quite sharp to me.