That sounds like a surefire way to ensure you'll be a cog for your entire career. Focus on delivering results.

how does that work if you wont be hired without prior experience in a particular stack to begin with

for current employment I’ve only ever seen teams push for using the next shiny thing solely to get that experience and professional validation in the current role, to be competitive for consideration in the next roles

It's unfortunately accurate that a lot of roles and people in those roles are indeed purely bullet-point driven for their resumes. If you're entering a role at a mid-level or junior, you're likely stuck with their tech stack choices. At senior or higher, it's usually about delivering results and the tech stack is up to you.

I've never paid much attention to specific job requirements, just whether or not I could solve the problems they were looking to solve.

The business risks surrounding unpopular choices are generally strong enough to overwhelm the technical arguments. So why should a lead choose htmx? IMO only if the project was trivial enough to bring on such whimsical risk.

The fact that a library which does nothing more than swap a DOM element after an XHR request has the entire React community forming a collective shield wall should illuminate why it’s a dead-end technology.

these are the kinds of things people say in interviews and then wonder if their rejection was an example of ageism in tech

> If you're entering a role at a mid-level or junior, you're likely stuck with their tech stack choices. At senior or higher, it's usually about delivering results and the tech stack is up to you.

> I've never paid much attention to specific job requirements, just whether or not I could solve the problems they were looking to solve.

So then I assume you’ve always been a senior developer?

Also I think this probably depends on domains/culture/multitude of factors. There are a lot of places where senior is just “cog with a lot of experience” or “cog with a lot of tenure”.

I have no idea how to sell that

I can also build anybody’s application in any stack, but that doesnt get me in the door, doesnt get the recruiter to say anything, doesnt get any hiring manager intro call

What kind of clientele are you going to where you’re just like “I am computer man, from internet, I can build that for you” and they’re like “woooooowwwww you’re hired!”