But I also _spent_ a bunch of time as soon as I needed something slightly different to OOTB (or sometimes just wanted to understand how a thing worked better). At that point I ended up digging through Radix code, React library documentation where there were frequently multiple ways of doing the same thing and I had no idea which was "best". I had to delve into some of the more complex (to me, as a newbie) patterns like forwardRef. And this was all for a very trivial site/app that needed some form interactions.

My takeaway at the end was, I'd learnt a bunch of new stuff, which was the point, but that was all workarounds for dealing with the complexities introduced by the tools which were meant to simplyfy my life.

Perhaps for large projects with multiple devs, they bring efficiencies of scale. I think for my next solo project I'm trying Rails or Django with htmx.