A while back, I made a half-observation, half-joke on LinkedIn . The great JavaScript toolchain rewrite barged in. The older tools that helped cement the language's place in our stacks became uncool, if not suspicious. Their sluggish performance took the blame for slowing down millions of lines of code on their way to production. It's increasingly difficult to keep track of the cool kids on the block. Their names might not be catchy, but their promise is captivating: speed, and a lot of it. It's a strange time to be a JavaScript developer. The language has never been more ubiquitous, yet it seems to be losing ground in its own backyard. The tools are faster, the setup easier, the abstractions thicker. We write, configure and wait less. We bundle, ship and hotfix more. What happens between our code and the end product becomes easier to ignore. The benchmarks are all beaming green. The line charts are trending up, down, or sideways—whichever direction means fewer calls at 3 AM.…