Yes, I think it was possible to build and maintain a scaffolding project in Django and Rails but near impossible to do today with JS and Node.js ecosystem due to the rapid change, in fact it’s hard to even keep a simple project up to date.
Let me give you some specific examples from my own experience with the react/npm and node.js ecosystem. If you started a project last year, this year you’d probably need to:
- update react router to V4 which require a complete rewrite, because well they found a better way to do routing
- update react boostrap, well bootstrap 4 finally released
- if you used react material ui then you’re not in a better position, since they’re rewriting it again after screwing up their inline styling strategy
- updated all your components to react to 16, which broke half of the other smaller libraries because it no longer include the prototype validation library
- update the forms library, we used formsy react which almost died but then luckily new maintainers came to rescue it
- update the data grid, we are using react data grid, and that is still blocking the update path to react 16
- we used framework7 in one mobile update, and last year they released v2 which again require a complete rewrite since well they found a better way, but then who uses html fm7 now, use react native, but it’s 2018 how about vue nativescript
And there are many more, notice that these are all core libraries, routing, view rendering, data grid, forms, and UI components, they all required major rewrite within a year. If you go back one more year, you’ll probably need to rewrite your entire project since now we’re using imports and ES6. And frankly, out of all those libraries Meteor has been the most backward compatible, I had a project written in Blaze few years back and I just run meteor update to 1.6.1 added few nm packages and it worked again!
So I’m not sure how anyone could create and maintain a scaffolding project under so much churn.