JavaScript's midlife crisis: the ecosystem won, but developers are losing control of the toolchain

The JavaScript Midlife Crisis

JavaScript turns 30. The ecosystem is bigger than ever, but the toolchain is being rewritten in Rust, Go, and Zig. The author argues that rewriting a bundler in Rust makes it 10x faster, but also shrinks the pool of JS developers who can maintain it. The source is still open, but the door to contributions is closing. The post doesn't offer a fix—just a warning: speed isn't free, and we're trading maintainability for milliseconds.