Can someone explain to me the obsession with the MEAN stack?

My opinion is that - these days - for every fifty programmers, there is only one that actually knows how to build software.

I just finished the front-end track, to enhance my understanding of JS. Slowly shifting away from jQuery, I also looked for other options. So, the MEAN stack seemed more than appropriate.

After some serious research (which include courses, workshops, and 20+ years experience), unfortunately, I seem to hate it.

I hold an overall dislike for things such as Bootstrap, because it allows the inexperienced to stay inexperienced, and not to understand why things need to be present within the code they write. As someone who is just as critical about themselves, this was the reason why I felt the need to go deeper with vanilla JS as opposed to using a library.

If a library breaks something, or doesn't work according to how it's planned to work, it's always altered by the team - which defeats the purpose of using it - allowing your code to become unnecessarily bloated.

So it came down to this... I've been playing with Node, NPM, Express. I really, really liked it at first, but as I started to get further into my courses, I started to see all the things that were purposely avoided a decade ago within the software development community.

Now, after doing about a week's worth of QA... the idea of embracing the MEAN stack is broken. Shattered. The application of such a technology is globally half-assed with 1000 iterations being exactly that... a process repeated way too many times, so one thing can finally go into production. This is not something a developer can be, or should be proud of.

Angular is a great example. Look how a complete rewrite was needed to fix the unfixable, and now more people are walking away from it because it's as if Google has reinvented the wheel... and, it was them that invented it in the first place. This does nothing to convince me of its effectiveness. MongoDB is hated by anyone with serious DB experience. To them, it's a joke and no way to manage data past an intermediate level.

The main purpose was to play with the idea of creating an Electron app. However, a responsive website and native apps - even though they are more work - appear as if they're have a longer, more effective lifespan.

My current decision is to kick it "old-school", and dive into PHP/MySQL - however - I'm looking for anyone to counter this argument/decision against the MEAN stack, and show me that it may be worth the time... instead of what I feel is a waste of time. Both "fairy tales and horror stories" will be appreciated so I can make this choice wisely.

Thanks guys.