Even if it somehow manages to succeed at its mission and become the defacto toolchain for all of frontend, I feel its improvements over the status quo will be short lived, and over the long run having a monolithic toolchain dominate will prove to be a net-negative for the frontend tooling ecosystem.
Having a single defacto monolithic toolchain greatly raises the barrier to entry for new competing tools, as they'd no longer be able to just compete on the merits of doing any individual task better than its direct competition to gain adoption.
Having different single purpose tools that can people can pick and choose from independently of each other is a crucial part of what has enabled rapid innovation in the JS tooling ecosystem up till now, since it keeps implementation/switching costs for any individual tool as low as it can reasonably be for that specific use-case.
This comes at the cost of making it harder for any individual to keep up with all the latest innovations (as critics of the JS tooling ecosystem are often quick to point out), but projects like create-react-app have been fairly successful at addressing this through sourcing collective wisdom from the community to create a collection of best-in-class tools configured to work effectively together out of the box.
I can also totally emphasize that there are many low-hanging fruits in terms of efficiencies to be gained through unifying tooling to avoid wasted work and maintenance overhead, but I'm of the opinion that the gains in efficiency isn't going to be worth the cost in potential for stifled innovation, and that those efficiencies are better achieved through shared specs and shared low-level libraries that individual tools can choose to adopt if they become compelling enough.
I'm personally still going to be rooting for single purpose tools + curated collections over any monolithic toolchain.
With all that said, I for one would totally welcome something new in the formatting space to challenge prettier that decouples the line-length based autoformatting from the opinionated default styling presets.
Even if it somehow manages to succeed at its mission and become the defacto toolchain for all of frontend, I feel its improvements over the status quo will be short lived, and over the long run having a monolithic toolchain dominate will prove to be a net-negative for the frontend tooling ecosystem.
Having a single defacto monolithic toolchain greatly raises the barrier to entry for new competing tools, as they'd no longer be able to just compete on the merits of doing any individual task better than its direct competition to gain adoption.
Having different single purpose tools that can people can pick and choose from independently of each other is a crucial part of what has enabled rapid innovation in the JS tooling ecosystem up till now, since it keeps implementation/switching costs for any individual tool as low as it can reasonably be for that specific use-case.
This comes at the cost of making it harder for any individual to keep up with all the latest innovations (as critics of the JS tooling ecosystem are often quick to point out), but projects like create-react-app have been fairly successful at addressing this through sourcing collective wisdom from the community to create a collection of best-in-class tools configured to work effectively together out of the box.
I can also totally emphasize that there are many low-hanging fruits in terms of efficiencies to be gained through unifying tooling to avoid wasted work and maintenance overhead, but I'm of the opinion that the gains in efficiency isn't going to be worth the cost in potential for stifled innovation, and that those efficiencies are better achieved through shared specs and shared low-level libraries that individual tools can choose to adopt if they become compelling enough.
I'm personally still going to be rooting for single purpose tools + curated collections over any monolithic toolchain.