> libraries are a bit like office politics for front-end web developers -- basically something that feels like work and "advances your career", while in truth it's just a way to avoid doing the real work with actual customers.

That's pretty scary, if true. That sounds very analogous to academic research and the "publish or perish" state of affairs in academia today.

Office politics often will advance your career in any sizable organization. That's why people engage in it. If publishing libraries is an extension of that, then we should be worried about the precedent that's setting for software development as a whole (because it'd be silly to assume that this remains siloed to front-end developers).

Capitalism is actually a pretty efficient antidote to that. The way it works is that as a field ossifies into one where everyone is focused on looking good rather than actually being good, the potential financial returns to defecting from the consensus social order and doing something different increase. At some point, someone's bound to say "The emperor has no clothes!", do something that people actually want, and make out like a bandit.

> Capitalism is actually a pretty efficient antidote to that.

Ehh I'm not really sure how that applies here, especially since the market of "javascript libraries" is probably about as free as you can get (in many senses of the word).

There isn't much going on in the way of financial return in that market, probably because people are seeing the benefit of implicit financial return (via the "office politicking" we're discussing here) and banking on that.

In which case, I'm not sure how capitalism will help.

It works on a level outside the JS library ecosystem: if people are judging potential new employees by their GitHub profiles, and that is resulting in people publishing all sorts of crap on GitHub to make themselves more employable, then eventually the reputational value of having published a JS library will go to zero (possibly even negative). Instead, employers will look for better indications of programmer quality, perhaps "Does anybody use your library?" Eventually some of the savvier programmers will realize that, they'll work on targeting real needs more deeply and really solving them well, and the huge mass of mediocre JS libraries will be replaced by a few good ones.