Why Framework Fatigue Is Real (And Why Some Devs Are Secretly Going Back to PHP)

There’s a moment — and if you’ve been in this field long enough, you know it — when your head slumps forward at the sound of yet another JavaScript framework announcement. That moment when someone proudly claims their new frontend tool is “three times faster than React” and “removes all boilerplate with AI.” You know, the usual. And if you’re in web development long enough — like two decades long enough, as we are at Above Bits (or AB, as we like to call it internally) — you start to see patterns. You also start getting déjà vu in conference talks.

Here’s the strange truth: the web dev world is spinning faster than ever, but many devs (including us) are quietly walking the other way. Not because we don’t love new tools — we do. But web development in Charlotte, and frankly anywhere else that real clients exist, still relies on more than just the hype machine.

Let’s talk about why framework fatigue is real, why some devs are starting to romanticize their old PHP days, and why sometimes the best tool isn’t the newest — it’s the one you actually understand.

The Hype Is Real, and So Is the Burnout

Back in 2016, there were already too many JavaScript frameworks to count. Today, the number has ballooned into the hundreds, and that’s just what’s actively maintained. In the last five years alone, we’ve had Svelte, Solid, Astro, Qwik, and FreshJS, each promising to solve all your problems in 5kb or less.

Developers, of course, jump on these like cats chasing laser pointers. But here’s what they don’t show you in the demos: the long-term cost of adoption. Learning curves. Team ramp-up times. Poor documentation. Ecosystems that shift weekly. When we talk to clients interested in web development in Charlotte, we often explain that using bleeding-edge tech can sometimes leave you… Well, bleeding.

At AB, we’ve seen projects where developers chose a shiny new framework, and a year later, they had to rebuild the whole front end because nobody could maintain it. Or worse, the lead developer left and took all the knowledge with them.

“Wait, Are We Just Building Fancy PHP Again?”

It’s an honest question I asked during a stand-up last year. We were reviewing a modern Jamstack architecture that involved serverless functions, dynamic API routes, static site generation, and hydration on the client. It took six tools, three deployment platforms, and some very fragile CI/CD plumbing to make it work.

And when we stepped back, someone on the team said, “You know, we used to just do this with PHP and jQuery.”

Suddenly, it clicked. Despite a decade of tooling evolution, the core job hadn’t changed: get some data, render it for the user, maybe store a few things, make it fast. There’s a global trend now, especially among agencies working with realistic timelines and budgets, to rethink whether we need a new abstraction layer.

In our own web development in Charlotte projects, we’ve had small business clients whose sites still hum along on WordPress (which, yes, is built on PHP) and outperform competitors using React-heavy setups that are slow, bloated, and require 3+ seconds to load above the fold.

When Meta and Google Say “Jump,” Developers Ask “Off Which Framework?”

This slowdown might be limited to smaller shops or local markets like those in North Carolina. Not quite. Even giants are feeling the heat.

Facebook (sorry — Meta) once touted React as the future of the web. But even internally, they’ve started trimming it. Instagram’s newer mobile web experience avoids much of the legacy React stack. Meta recently restructured large parts of its codebase to improve performance by simplifying things and reducing unnecessary abstraction.

Google, on the other hand, has been pushing performance-first thinking hard. Core Web Vitals is no longer just a cute metric — it now affects your search rankings. So what are teams doing? They’re stripping frameworks, reducing JS payloads, and getting closer to the metal. One Google team even launched a version of their documentation site without JavaScript — and saw load times plummet from 2.5 seconds to under 500ms.

We bring this lesson to every web development project in Charlotte: just because you can build with five frameworks and two headless CMSs doesn’t mean you should.

The Quiet Rise of “Just Enough JavaScript”

A term floating around dev circles: “Just Enough JavaScript.” It’s not about going full retro with tables and inline styles, but about using modern tools conservatively — and only when they provide real value.

At Above Bits, we’ve embraced that. Depending on the job, we’ve built modern interfaces using Vue.js, Alpine.js, and even classic jQuery. We’re not anti-framework; we’re anti-overkill. There’s a big difference.

A good example is a recent Charlotte-based restaurant platform we built. They wanted fast-loading pages, custom forms, and mobile-first design. We could’ve used React or Vue, but we ran benchmarks and found a mix of server-rendered PHP, minimal JavaScript, and Cloudflare caching gave us near-instant performance. The client was thrilled, and they didn’t need a DevOps degree to update their menu.

It’s this kind of local innovation in digital platforms—not flash—that keeps sites lean, budget-friendly, and client-manageable. We’ve refined this over nearly 20 years in the field.

Remember the “Full Stack” Developer? They’re Becoming Endangered

One side effect of this hyper-specialization is that it’s becoming increasingly rare to find a developer who can build an entire application, front to back, without diving into StackOverflow 23 times before lunch.

There’s even a joke: “Modern web development is just Googling how to add a button… for 3 hours.”

That’s not far off. Many junior developers are overwhelmed by modern tooling. They know React hooks but can’t explain a basic server request. They can configure Tailwind but can’t write plain CSS. When clients approach us for web development in Charlotte, one of their most significant pain points is not knowing who can actually own the entire site build, not just patch one part of it.

This is where experience matters. AB’s developers have spent decades working across stacks, databases, and hosting environments—not just deploying pre-made templates. It’s not always glamorous, but it works—and more importantly, it scales.

The Economics of Simplicity

We can’t talk about modern development without talking about cost. At the end of the day, it’s not just a question of what works — it’s what works within the budget.

Ask any founder who accidentally burned through $50,000 on a React + headless CMS build with animations no one uses. Or the agency that chose a trendy stack and then had to hire two extra devs just to maintain it.

One of our most quoted mantras at AB is this: “Every line of code is a liability.” That means we build what’s needed — nothing more, nothing less. If PHP and MySQL will do the trick for a fast MVP, we’ll use them. If Vue or Nuxt makes a frontend cleaner, we’ll use that. But always with one eye on maintainability.

Web development in Charlotte isn’t just about what’s cool — it’s about what’s cost-effective, sustainable, and aligned with business goals. And honestly, that’s what keeps clients coming back.

If you’re curious about how that approach works in practice, you might want to review this overview of our Charlotte-based development expertise.

Back to the Future: The Monolith Strikes Back

Remember when monoliths were the villains of the dev world? “Too tightly coupled,” they said. “Hard to scale.” So the industry scattered into microservices, JAMstacks, headless CMSs, edge functions, and enough deployment layers to make a senior engineer cry.

But here’s what we’ve learned the hard way: sometimes, putting everything in one place just works better.

The global pushback is already underway. A 2024 report by Software Engineering Daily revealed that 47% of companies that tried microservices in the past three years have since consolidated some of their services back into monolithic structures—not because microservices are bad, but because they introduced too much operational overhead: too many moving parts, too much DevOps, and too little ROI.

We’ve seen the same in projects involving web development in Charlotte. For small to mid-size businesses, a monolithic Laravel or Symfony app, well-structured, tested, and properly documented, can outperform a stitched-together network of serverless APIs and third-party services any day.

AB built one such system for a local educational nonprofit. The original plan involved a JAMstack frontend, a Firebase backend, and Airtable for content. But as deadlines approached and costs crept up, we proposed an old-school Laravel build instead. The result? Faster load times, easier admin tools, lower hosting costs, and happier users. That’s what we call a win.

The Secret Surge of PHP Developers in 2025

Let’s be honest: PHP was the web’s punchline for years. It was mocked for its inconsistency, its messy syntax, and the terrifying legacy codebases it left behind. But in 2025? It’s having a bit of a renaissance.

Blame Laravel. Blame Symfony. Blame the fact that PHP 8.3 introduced real performance improvements and JIT compilation. Or blame burnout from the JavaScript arms race.

Whatever the cause, PHP is quietly making a comeback — especially among seasoned devs who value fast build times, reliable hosting, and fewer dependencies. GitHub’s 2024 report showed a 12% increase in PHP usage globally, driven by developers working on custom web apps, APIs, and modern frontends powered by Inertia.js or Livewire.

And it makes sense. For most practical use cases — especially in web development in Charlotte, where clients need results, not resumes — PHP just works. It’s cheap to host, well-documented, and backward compatible enough to run legacy systems while enabling modern features.

At Above Bits, we’ve never stopped using it. In fact, one of our longest-running clients still has a custom-built e-commerce system in PHP that we built in 2012. It’s been upgraded and patched over the years, but still powers thousands of dollars in daily sales, without a single headless component.

When Shiny Tools Break: Stories from the Trenches

We’ve seen it all — the good, the bad, and the “wait, why is the dev server running on Windows 7?”

One Charlotte-based project we inherited last year was built entirely on a bleeding-edge stack: Next.js 13 (app router edition), Supabase, and Tailwind UI. Everything looked amazing — until it didn’t. The deployment pipeline broke every time Next.js pushed an update. The image optimization plugin didn’t support WebP correctly on iOS. The CMS provider changed their API and broke live previews. Clients were frustrated, and the site ran slower than expected.

It took us three weeks to migrate the entire thing to a leaner, SSR-focused solution with fewer dependencies and better cache control. Same design. Same data. Just… faster.

We’ve baked this lesson into every discussion about web development in Charlotte: don’t chase trends for the sake of them. Choose tools that solve problems, not ones that create new ones.

When Code Meets Common Sense

In our two decades at Above Bits, we’ve worked with clients from all walks of life — law firms, e-commerce giants, nonprofits, local services, even fantasy sports startups. Some had teams. Some had no idea what a domain name was.

But they all wanted the same thing: a website that works.

We’ve seen that success in web development often comes down to one underrated factor: practicality. It does not mean being the fastest or fanciest; it means making wise decisions, balancing costs, and building for the long haul.

That’s why we often say we’re not “framework-first.” We’re “outcome-first.” If Tailwind makes a design project fly, we use it. If vanilla CSS and some media queries get the job done better, we’ll go with that. And yes, if PHP still rules for your business needs, we’re not just okay with it, we recommend it.

Maybe It’s Time for a Saner Web

If there’s a takeaway here, it’s not “burn your React docs” or “run screaming back to LAMP stacks.” It’s this: the web doesn’t need to be so complicated.

You don’t need a Hollywood budget to build a high-performance website. You don’t need 12 frameworks to manage a contact form. And you don’t need to hire five teams to complete one thing.

Sometimes, the most powerful tech decision you can make is choosing less.

At Above Bits, we’ve been building digital platforms that way since 2006. We’re not the flashiest, but we’re efficient and reliable. And when it comes to web development in Charlotte and throughout North Carolina, we bring experience, knowing when to push boundaries and trim the fat.

If you’re ready to build something that works, your team can understand, and your users will love. Check out what makes us different at abovebits.com.

Don’t ask us to use a framework that has yet to reach version 1.0. We’ve made that mistake before.

And once was enough.