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Web dev friends: What was your "aha!" moment in web dev? What revelation or scenario made you a senior? What made you find out "how the sausage is made" that fundamentally changed your view on web development? (Please boost for reach 🙏)

I'm not really sure if I'm a senior webdev or just a senior annoyance these days, but... Recently it's been the allure and problems around raw DOM APIs: I love me direct access to the DOM, but I can't deny that it's also easy to end up with layout thrashing. A framework's most important aspect is

controlling reads and writes on the DOM, or phasing them. To me at least. Yet, I'd prefer smaller frameworks, because at the end of the day most things in a UI are quite small. eg. Backbone's directness is nice but its lack of phasing and absolutely lackluster control over property access is bad.

Or maybe rather "lackluster attitude to property storage". Just smash everything into the model and access it using generic get/set methods is a horrible way to create efficient code.