How did he managed to push his own framework. I’d love to rewrite the world, that’s so much more fun than converting Json to sql. But it would be a very hard sell to management to write our own framework instead of using something battle tested like spring boot.
Rich Harris did a lot of data viz work (IIRC) during his tenure at the NYT. I don't know if you have experience working with D3 and other template/view libraries but it's always been painful. D3 can also append the dom, so it makes certain parts of the API harder to use. There's also the need to work with large amounts of array values that are uniquely made with D3 (various SVG paths). I can easily see multiple teams adopting it if it makes writing interactive data visualizations that much easier.
Supposedly Svelte is able to do this very well, haven't had the chance to try it with D3 myself.
Well the Jeremy Ashkenas (of Backbone, Underscore, CoffeeScript) and Mike Bostock (of D3) used to work there as well and I'm pretty sure the NYTimes pretty heavily embraced some of those libraries with impressive results, so it's probably part of the culture there.
