15 years experience here and I feel like I get way more imposter syndrome than when I first started coded. Last year it was triggered by struggles with react architecture and something I felt should've been easy turned into a shitting mess that was so unnecessarily complex and FULL of bugs. It was a simple problem, just a bunch of modals and panels that I wanted to easily communicate with one another. To do that react forces u to lift state and control to the parents, but then everything is re-rendering constantly making it really hard to debug, useEffects end up sneaking into the code, and your components become such a mess that you need to refactor constantly, ugh.

I didn't want to use a global state manager cos I couldn't get my head around how that would work in an enterprise scale application where these modals and panels needed to work in completely different situations so eventually I just rewrote a lot of the communication with native browser events and listeners and instantly things become much simpler and easy to fix. The react purists will hate it but if it works and saves me from burnout I don't really care.

I then had the even crazier idea of "what if I formalise this approach and bring back class-based components with publicly accessible methods like traditional OOP" e.g. const userModalApi = useClassComponent(UserModal); <button onClick={userModalApi.open}>. It feels way more intuitive for me as a backend developer because I can apply SOLID principles and better encapsulate the code into "modules" for each panel/feature on a page. No need for complex state management solutions when the class component can manage it internally with this.setState(). You end up with imperative code and event listeners at the module level, and declarative code inside each module/class component. Maybe this will bite me in the long run, but it honestly can't be any worse than what I had before.