The Fetishization of Freshness
We treat our dependencies like perishable goods, terrified that a week-old version is already rotten. A look at why we prioritize newness over stability, and the fatigue of eternal upgrades.
There is a specific kind of anxiety reserved for the frontend developer who runs npm outdated. Seeing that wall of red text—major version bumps, minor updates, patch releases—triggers a fight-or-flight response. We feel dirty. We feel negligent. We feel that by not being on version 14.2.1 of our favorite framework (when 14.2.2 came out this morning), we are somehow failing our craft.
We have fetishized freshness. We have convinced ourselves that "new" is synonymous with "good," and that "old" (which in our industry means released six months ago) is synonymous with "broken."
This obsession is not cost-free. We pay for it with our sanity, our stability, and our weekends.
We are not just maintaining software anymore; we are curating a collection of volatile dependencies that rot faster than fruit.
The Upgrade Treadmill
I recently spent two days upgrading a project's dependencies. The application features did not change. The performance did not improve. The user experience remained exactly the same. But I had to do it because three key libraries had released "breaking changes" that stopped security patches for the versions I was using.
This is the tax we pay for the modern web stack. We have traded the stability of the platform for the velocity of the ecosystem. But is it really velocity if we spend 20% of our time just staying in place?
In other engineering disciplines, stability is a feature. You don't tear down a bridge every two years to replace the bolts with newer, shinier bolts. But in frontend development, if you aren't rewriting your build pipeline every year, you are accumulating "technical debt."
Breaking Changes as a Lifestyle
The concept of Semantic Versioning (SemVer) was supposed to save us. It gave us a contract: "If I only bump the major version, I promise not to break your code."
But library authors have weaponized SemVer. A "major" version bump used to be a significant event. Now, it's a Tuesday. Libraries will release v4, v5, and v6 in the span of a year, each time changing APIs, renaming exports, and altering behavior.
"Just run the migration script," they say.
But migration scripts rarely work perfectly on complex codebases. They miss edge cases. They don't handle custom abstractions. And suddenly, your "quick upgrade" is a forensic investigation into why the dropdown menu now renders behind the footer.
Stability is Underrated
There is a quiet dignity in finished software. Code that runs, does its job, and doesn't need to be touched. We have lost respect for this state. We view a repository that hasn't been committed to in a year as "dead," when it might just be "done."
We need to stop equating activity with value. A library that updates weekly isn't necessarily better than one that updates annually; it might just be buggier.
When did we decide that our tools should move faster than our products? The users don't care if you are using the experimental concurrent mode or the latest bundler. They care if the button works.
The JOMO (Joy of Missing Out)
I am proposing a radical strategy: Intentional Stagnation.
- Don't upgrade unless you need a specific feature or security patch.
- Treat "major version" bumps with extreme suspicion.
- Value libraries with slow, boring release cycles.
- Accept that you will not be using the "cool" new syntax for a while.
Let the early adopters find the bugs. Let the ecosystem churn and burn. You can stay one step behind, on the solid ground of stable releases, watching the chaos from a safe distance.
Your code doesn't rot because it's old. It rots because the world around it changes and we blindly try to keep up. Sometimes, the best way to win the race is to stop running on the treadmill.