One thing that I realized recently is that if you have a mantra of making "data-driven decisions", then you have raised the cost of making a decision. What you then need is a tool that minimizes the number of decisions you have to make. Gartner, Rails, Spring, each try to do some of that in their own ways.
That's where his 3 weeks of decisions about libraries reveals a real mismatch between React and the enterprise way of doing things. React requires a lot of decision making, and enterprises are bad at making decisions.
Ultimately, the fault is with the enterprise. Sometimes you don't need official data, you just need someone with good taste to make a decision (and if your developers cannot usually "disagree and commit", that's a people problem). Save the data for the big picture stuff.
Absolutely. Think about iOS or Android (native) development. Sure, the ecosystem is quite big, however you do not have the level of flexibility that the web has. You are limited not only in terms of languages, but also certain architectural decisions are bounded by the limits imposed by Framework (the Android or iOS SDK), so there are many decisions that _are already taken_, and for better or worse you have to live with it.
That is probably what I hate the most of front-end development compared with back-end or Mobile. There are too many options, and that certainly does not promote consistency within the project.
You could also make decisions not based on data but on your experience. That's how most arts and craftmanship works, and thus why software is often argued to be somewhere between engineering and craftmanship.
That's where his 3 weeks of decisions about libraries reveals a real mismatch between React and the enterprise way of doing things. React requires a lot of decision making, and enterprises are bad at making decisions.
Ultimately, the fault is with the enterprise. Sometimes you don't need official data, you just need someone with good taste to make a decision (and if your developers cannot usually "disagree and commit", that's a people problem). Save the data for the big picture stuff.