People buy into ideas and once they've paid the price, they dislike when that investment is challenged with new information. The resistance that I see in these thread to the idea that going back to HTML might be enough, to me looks very much like that.

Basecamp (formerly 37signals) has a track record of challenging the status quo, whether in business or engineering practices and to actually be fair, they're not changing their front-end philosophy on a whim or to simply follow a fad. They're trying to solve real problems. In the past, their flagship product served as proof that exposed many established counter-advices as merely baseless beliefs. Over the years, they've demonstrated how many "bad ideas" could actually work better for you, once you allow yourself to become a bit more pragmatic.

They might not be BIG, but they're also not small. Imo, what they say and do engineering-wise tends to matter much more to average developers than what Facebook or Google might recommend.

I think the question stands, is Basecamp a good enough example?

I wouldn’t say they’ve exactly changed their philosophy.

To me it seems more like they’ve evolved it.

From Rails UJS using jQuery, to vanilla Js, then TurboLinks and onto today’s tools like Turbo and Stimulus.

The evolution isn’t a bad thing, and the older approaches still work in modern rails.

They’ve changed and updates the build tools, but then you have to keep up.

They went from Sprockets, to Webpacker, and then module loading to replace Webpacker.

So they’ve haven’t changed philosophy as such, it’s just considered and measure evolution and refinement.

Feels that way in practice to me anyway! :-)

I think this is a rational strategy. They aren't changing concepts just randomly for that alone. As we learn problems with the last approach we try something new to address it. If you're starting a new app green field this is an ideal time to try to shed some baggage.