How to pierce through illusions
There is a law called Amara's Law that states the following:
We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.
This ties in with the so called hype cycle. That cycle has five phases starting at inflated expectations through disillusionment arriving on the plateau of productivity. The thing to learn is how to skip all these phases and arrive at the end immediately. I hope I will give you some insight on how to approach this.
The first thing is the most difficult one. Not to get excited at the new shiny toy that is so alluring and mesmerizing that you drop all reason and you just feel like this must be the greatest thing on Earth, how can we ever live without it now that it is here. Just calm yourself, take a few breaths and try to work out the following question :
What problem does this new piece of technology solve or is it trying to solve?
That question will leave you aside from the how and what and get you to the why. That is the most important question you need answered before you can evaluate in the most objective way possible whether or not this new piece of tech is for you, is good, is great or simply not worth your time. Or maybe, just maybe, it is not good at all. If you read my post about React for example, I do not think it is great at all. Not at the beginning and not now. The reason for it is the problem it tries to solve. That particular problem is not a real problem and furthermore it has already been solved by IETF in regular HTML5 spec coupled with the TS39 spec for JavaScript. You already had a Shadow DOM which could be used for self contained apps. The concept of a Virtual DOM already existed and if you needed structure in the front-end development world then Angular did a far better job at that than they did. Well maybe not AngularJS specific, but these days yes. So why did people use it? Because Facebook made it and uses it and therefore it is the shit. Same reasoning can be applied in reverse, that company uses it well then therefore it must be bad and I will never use it because reasons.
That is the other thing to look out for that feeling or sensation that everyone is using it because everyone else is using it. There are certain things that have just become best practices, these are learned through experience and failures, a lot of failures in most cases, and therefore are considered to be quite good and that is why everyone is using it. It is on a good foundation. If you can not answer why you are using a piece of tech with some solid good clear well-founded reasons then maybe you should not be using it.
Again the question to the answer why is very important to solve the problem of piercing through the illusions. Just like a real illusionist where you usually stop at the how does he do it, it is better to focus on the why does he do all these actions if you want to stop being fooled.