pandoc is interesting because with markdown it currently converts the "alt text" for figures  in markdown->pdf conversion into the figure captions, which is cool but makes me think: it is not alt anymore, anyone should have it
everyone has a choice in taking on those dependencies. as a solo dev you get to make those choices. In the context of work, it is harder because you have to balance many other needs from technical to just the human squishy feeling of making people's code get accepted and not fighting everyone on every damn thing. It's hard to get everyone on the same page!
Not really related to the above but I learned React when I started my current job and I hated and did not understand it when I first started https://cmdcolin.github.io/posts/2020-07-04. Now it has changed my thinking entirely, and I think react is very powerful. Not without awkwardness and whatnot, but it's better than spaghetti jQuery era
We are now in an intermediate hell of Babel and webpack though...the language is cool, but the toolchains are really crazy right now. Someone could dismiss my argument if they got a comfy setup but often times if you're doing even just a little trailblazing you get into some wtf territory. I spent all day this week setting up a karma test cause my node module was failing only in the browser so then I added Babel and karma-webpack, but then regenerator runtime kept giving me errors, then mixing require() and es6 import gave me insanity errors and I almost gave up. Deep googling gave me barely enough clues to get through it...
pandoc is interesting because with markdown it currently converts the "alt text" for figures  in markdown->pdf conversion into the figure captions, which is cool but makes me think: it is not alt anymore, anyone should have it