Incompatible with Web

The whole platform, bottom to top, wakes up an innate and primal feeling of complete disgust within me. From writing APIs to managing databases to pulling JS libraries.. And especially having to work with a new JS framework with every new client.. I am completely incompatible with Web Development.

Two weeks ago my good friend (and ex-flatmate) offered me a quick gig to get me on my feet; the gig was to fix up a landing page and make it look good in the client's eyes as well as functional. Sounds like simple and easy money, right? WRONG.

See, that landing page was built entirely on meteor AND react. You read that right. A super simple landing page using those chainsaws nuclear bombs that I have no idea how to operate.
Worse, within the code there's also JQuery, Bootstrap.js/css, babel, and a whole other bunch of other questionably employed bloat that breaks everything if you remove it. There's so much it's legitimately depressing.

The more depressing aspect has to be the fact that this kind of project is under the peak of the bell curve, not an outlier. Everything is so broken and ugly and bloated and hacked together everywhere I look.. Everything is obnoxiously wasting so much resources for novelty features.. With complete disregard to any form of engineering or design.
Thing is, I'm not fluent in this trash, not enough to ditch the shitty parts and make something elegant. So you can imagine how I'm stuck like a rat between my bloat autism (bloatism?) and the actual bloat, unable to get anything done for the client.

And then, for my elegant solution to compete with the sheer volume of "web developers" who'd do it faster and cheaper and with more novelty features, I'd have to dedicate huge portions of my time to immerse in this tar pit. I'd have to actually be invested in those technologies fashion trends. Else I'll be bailing off contract after contract because it's too frustrating to get the damn thing to do what you want while conforming to the style and standards of whatever stack of frameworks it's written in. It's a mess.

Maybe the correct answer is that I should be desensitized to all of this ugliness and embrace it if I want to take those summer gigs. Maybe I should contribute to the web bloat and forego the simpler more beautiful internet.

No one is hiring for gemini as far as I'm concerned...