I get what he means and in most points I agree (I’ve worked primarily as a front end dev so far in my career), but as you get more familiar with these frameworks they tend to be so much faster to iterate on compared to a more “cleaner” setup. I’ve seen plenty of situations where using such frameworks were clearly overkill, but were still much faster to setup and were ready to be expanded on if needed in the future. Everything about the package ecosystem on web dev he’s 100% on point though. Things like the left pad situation are insane.

That would be a demonstration of your ability with said libraries/frameworks. I don’t see the issue. Unless you are talking about using just the tools with little customization, then it wouldn’t be very impressive. Still not an issue tho.