I would say I have the same strengths as you. I kind of see it like a "mid-stack engineer" or "middle tier" like you say. It's a lot of data wrangling. It can happen on the "back" of the client or the "front" of the server. I'm no good at design or meticulously tweaking animations. Neither am I interested in configuring Kubernetes or setting up a complex architecture of interacting backend services.

I get what you mean about hooks, I was initially apprehensive and like you I realized the problem they solved. I think the problem we have now, is they are the answer to everything, along with Context. Code that could have been a plain Javascript module is a hook that uses Context to pass refs between components.

I think a big issue is reactivity outside of a reactive view library isn't talked about much. You have libraries like RXJS and Effector, which I'm a big of, that let you handle reactivity separately from a view but they're still full black boxes themselves. I'm not sure many people think about reactivity as a quality separate from any library.

The libraries react-query and svelte-query are an interesting manifestation of this. I haven't diffed the code or anything but they share a core that is essentially the same. Observer based reactivity to handle async calls. Yet there are two different repos with duplicated code providing different frontends based on React and Svelte. I don't want to pick on how the code architecture or anything but it feels like the reason there isn't just a base "query" library that exposes its own Observer API with bindings to React and Svelte is because of the general refusal to accept splitting out responsibilities and there should be a "React way" of doing things.

I'm hoping the TC-39 Observer proposal along with Svelte's idea of a store contract might open a few eyes and show people that the frontend doesn't have to be the closed off black box that it currently is but a lot of people already seem set on the idea that Observers are some RXJS stream based thing that they want no part of.

Anyway sorry for the long reply. I've been thinking about this stuff a lot in trying to establish my course through all this.