I’ve noticed that a lot of times, the beliefs and conclusions of people (in tech, because that’s what I’m exposed to the most) are the sum of first page results from Google.
When out of curiosity I debugged an issue with rendering performance in a ReactJS app, I observed that although we used ImmutableJS, we were just initializing a new immutable object each time we got a new API response. We were not using the concept of persistent data structures to make our rendering more efficient, which is why it was taking about 5s for the whole app the render after getting the API response.
Well, someone decided that ImmutableJS was the way to go because it was trending at that time. The homepage looked decent too. As long as we’re using it, it doesn’t matter for what.
NoSQL’s “marketing” around performance was very effective for a certain demographic. SQL didn’t scale for you? You probably didn’t screw up the design, you just need a NoSQL solution for it. I know a team that moved from MSSQL to Mongo because NoSQL would potentially offer better performance. For a database few tens of MBs and not growing that fast.
Even during my initial days as a programmer, I held a lot of beliefs that were really not mine. Even I was guilty of it in retrospect.
Since then, I try to experiment around and verify things for myself, although it is very cumbersome. So it’s really important to prioritize.
As an individual, you probably have a lot of ideas that are in variance with the collective popular belief. And most likely, you might be on to something, because you’re at the very least thinking for yourself.