Anyone feeling programming is in the era of constant wrestling with libraries, frameworks and tools?

I am senior backend Java developer. I cry for the days when in university or at home I could program something using plain Java or C++. It was a lot of work but I felt productive.

Nowadays I have to learn a new framework, a library, a build tool, a NoSQL DB, a CICD framework every 6-12 months. There is no time to really learn any of these very complex tools and become productive with them. Because it all starts over every 6-12 months.

A quick example would be “we need to use a MQ in our architecture, we choose one, e.g. ActiveMQ (Artemis).” (It could be any other MQ) It has a 600 pages long documentation (which is great btw), and we are expected to use and operate it correctly, efficiently etc. and do similarly for everything else in our toolbox.

My routine often helps but often doesn’t: “it worked this way in Spring, must be working similar in Micronaut, nope those guys did it totally differently”.

It’s not that I don’t like to learn, it’s the draining task of wrestling with the framework every once in a while instead of delivering a solution to a problem and move to the next feature.