Unpopular Opinion: Most Developer Tools Are Solutions Looking for Problems

Hot take: we have too many developer tools. I've catalogued 200+ developer tools while building awesome lists . Here's what I noticed: 90% of them solve problems created by other tools. We need bundlers because we chose to use 47 npm packages for a landing page We need Docker because we couldn't agree on runtime versions We need Kubernetes because Docker alone wasn't complex enough We need service meshes because Kubernetes networking was too simple We need observability platforms because we can't understand what our services are doing Each layer solves a real problem. But each layer also creates new problems that require new tools. The Complexity Ratchet Problem: "I need a website" → Solution: HTML file → Problem: "I need interactivity" → Solution: JavaScript → Problem: "Vanilla JS is messy" → Solution: React → Problem: "React is slow for static sites" → Solution: Next.js → Problem: "SSR is complex" → Solution: Vercel → Problem: "Vendor lock-in" → Solution: Coolify/self-hosted → Proble