> It is unavoidable to have a truly gigantic amount of (transitive) dependencies, and its rare you go a month of updates without it breaking your app.
I've maintained a sizeable react app for 8 years, and this has not been my experience at all. Maybe 10 years ago things would break monthly but nowadays things are quite stable, with very reasonable deprecation schedules and upgrade paths. I have lots of code running that I haven't touched in 5+ years and it is not causing any problems even when I'm keeping the main parts of the appliaction up to date with modern practices.
Nobody claimed browsers were changing drastically, they're talking about front end frameworks.
There are a lot of green screen terminal apps that still work today, and haven't been touched in more than 5 years. As long as you leave the same code on the same machine once it's working, and keep the moths off the vacuum tubes and the power flow steady, there shouldn't be a problem.
But try to change that CP/M parts terminal so it can interface with your new EPR and see how well it "just works".
I’m not sure what makes you think I’m talking about browsers, because I’m not :)
My point is just that the React ecosystem has become surprisingly stable. Of course if you are going to continuously rewrite things into the current flavour of the month framework, you are going to spend a lot of time doing that, but keeping up with upstream changes in dependencies is not something I have found particularly burdensome.
To take the project I mentioned above as an example,
currently it’s running on React 18.x, most dependencies are on the latest major version et.c. Still, much of the code is as it was written 8+ years ago, because the core APIs of React have been stable.
I've maintained a sizeable react app for 8 years, and this has not been my experience at all. Maybe 10 years ago things would break monthly but nowadays things are quite stable, with very reasonable deprecation schedules and upgrade paths. I have lots of code running that I haven't touched in 5+ years and it is not causing any problems even when I'm keeping the main parts of the appliaction up to date with modern practices.