Do you have a link to the FOSS project? I'd be interested to see the specific JS (and YAML) code that you're referring to.
My experience over the years has been that the language and tech stack matter much less than the discipline of the team. Rewrites always feel like a huge improvement for the first few months, but as time wears on they become just as convoluted and bloated, either because the domain is inherently complex or because the team thought that the old tooling was to blame for their own poor coding discipline.
I find it particularly interesting that YAML of all things is what you've turned to as an improvement. You'll find plenty of people on HN and elsewhere who've learned to avoid YAML like the plague because of bad experiences with it, so it seems clear that it's not objectively a better choice than JS for avoiding spaghetti.
If the admins using your project are sys admins, they seem to prefer yaml. Shrug.
I hesitated posting just because I had a feeling this would not make sense. The project is for super computers and so it’s niche for the admins since they are overburdened at their centers and don’t have time or sometimes the expertise to role their own JavaScript to do advanced things with a form that is then used on the backend to submit jobs to clusters and apps on HPC systems.
But this is a niche. My perception of the web dev space is it’s a mess and often has endless debates that do nothing for users, and much of the mess and debate centers around JS, a language that is the only choice (a monopoly) which then claims to be a great choice (how is that choice? Seriously, I’ve never understood that statement).
My experience over the years has been that the language and tech stack matter much less than the discipline of the team. Rewrites always feel like a huge improvement for the first few months, but as time wears on they become just as convoluted and bloated, either because the domain is inherently complex or because the team thought that the old tooling was to blame for their own poor coding discipline.
I find it particularly interesting that YAML of all things is what you've turned to as an improvement. You'll find plenty of people on HN and elsewhere who've learned to avoid YAML like the plague because of bad experiences with it, so it seems clear that it's not objectively a better choice than JS for avoiding spaghetti.