I'm really wondering: how can people switch frameworks / languages for each project so easily? Isn't there a lot of benefit to not having to learn everything new and doesn't that outweigh any technical advantages of the "next thing". And Laravel for example has such a broad, high quality ecosystem, that is mostly lacking in new projects..
It took me quite a while to get traction back then with ZendFramework V1.0
I fiddled around with Flow, from Typo3 and a bit of Laravel.
If you only add a controller here and there and do some simple database query you can work in 20 frameworks in one language in parallel.
I side with you, frameworks per project on a rapidly changing basis won’t work. Experience is a must, 3-6 month extensive exposure to doing some heavy lifting as well as debugging is a necessity. Staying up to date and dealing with migration issues as well as older version maintenance is a must, code reviews, build pipelines, even bug fixes or change requests.
Also frameworks evolve quite a bit over time and there also seems to be trends and biases towards certain tools or add-ins in certain cases, setups, configurations.
So in my experience I never met a jack of all trades, only real masters of one framework with all the ins and outs.
> I'm really wondering: how can people switch frameworks / languages for each project so easily?
My trick is to use Anki to remember the important details occasionally, and before starting a project in any particular language or framework to heavily review that language or framework in Anki beforehand.
After doing it a dozen times in each direction it gets easier - the advantage of being old is that one has much experience.
I agree that there's a lot of benefit to sticking with a thing. I've only seriously used Perl, PHP, Erlang, and Node, over 20+ years, deliberately. For productivity.
One reason for switching and trying is a fascination with finding the next amazing thing, always hunting for something new and better. Usually it's only slightly better, or not better. But sometimes you find Elixir, Laravel, or Deno. And it's more fun and productive, plus you're ahead on the resume.