The open source JS ecosystem, though, has soooooo many folks working on it that you can almost always find something you need. Certainly compared to something like Java, which has a couple "800 pound gorilla" projects, but then it falls off pretty quickly.
Of course, this is very much a double edge sword, with all the "leftpad" type dependency nightmares and security issues, as well as the "Hot new JS framework of the month" issues. Still, I think the dependency issues are solvable and dependency tooling is getting better, and the frameworks issue has calmed down a bit such that it's easy to stick to a couple major projects (e.g. React, Express) if so desired, but more experimental, cool stuff is always out there.
Yeah definitely a double edged sword. So much of the JS ecosystem is crap written by keen beginners who don't know what they're doing.
You might say "so what they're doing it for free, you don't have to use their stuff", but often you do because the existence of a sort-of-working solution means that other people are much less likely to write a robust solution for the same problem. So everyone ends up using the crap one.
My point was that JS has its 800 pound gorillas too, and so if you only want to use that, you can.
But it has so much of a broader ecosystem of other tools that if you're willing to take that risk it's an option. Java basically just doesn't have that.
Well those gorillas are really hard to maintain. Suppose you found that it wasn't quite what you wanted. Would you poke your head into the Kafka codebase?
Java Gorillas are far, far easier to maintain than JS mayflies. Static typing, top-notch refactoring tools, excellent IDE's with deep language analysis, stable ecosystems, minimal dependency chains, better performance, better profiling tools, trustable repositories with well-supported choices for self-hosting - the list goes on and on.
PS: I have already poked my head into the Kafka codebase in the past. Not the best written project and also confusing because of the Scala mix, but far more readable than several I have seen. And Java makes it easily navigable. Can even auto-gen diagrams to grok it better.
At the last company I worked at I only used C# + WPF (it was horrible). A couple jobs ago I only used R. There are companies with entire divisions that never have to touch javascript, and I'm certain there are companies that never use it. There's a very large world of programmers working for insurance/Healthcare/embedded/military/government that is nothing like modern web dev.
