I try to always reply honestly when talking about having kids. And I'm lucky to only have friends who do the same.
Usually I say something like "It's really hard, but it's so awesome at the same time that you forget how hard it is all the time. In the end, you feel like it's worth it."
I confess I wasn't that positive when I was totally sleep deprived. I also have the impression that no two situations are the same... Some parents have it very tough while some others have quite an easy time with their kids. You gotta have some luck...
Learning: I learned a big deal of web development (HTML, CSS and JS) from view-source.
Tweaking: I sometimes fix broken closed-source/proprietary applications or websites by checking the source and writing a user script.
Those two can probably fall into the "Nerd" category, though...
I agree that discoverability and selection of well-maintained packages is problematic in node (I couldn't compare with .NET core though).
But I disagree with you on picking Express as an example of this. I see Express as stable and very well maintained. If by "rotting" you mean "no new feature added", then sure, but I'd consider it a good thing: it is mature and stable, and is used by a lot of people around the world to power pretty demanding apps.
Exactly my thought when I tried Vue.js: on the surface, it's knockout with some react-inspired additions that make it faster. I loved being able to pick up Vue.js and make something that just worked in 30 minutes.
I was pretty happy with openshift until I recently discovered it was impossible to update the version of an os package I depended on. On heroku, custom buildpack and it was done in 5 minutes.
I do the same. But my rationale for normal browsing with firefox is not about tooling, it's really about what OP says in the article. Agreed on the adress bar though.