I completely disagree with that statement. Several frameworks have excellent documentation such as; Symfony and Laravel. As for limitations I always find that as a cop out answer for those people who don’t like using frameworks. At the end of the day if you can view source there are no limitations only the ones you impose. Not to mention using open source projects and contributing back enriches the community in general. When you chose to use open source frameworks over rolling your own you also provide more value for a client because the transition to other developers has less of a learning curve. For all these reasons I mentioned I truly believe that people who think like you to be very selfish individuals not enriching the community or helping the ecosystem which they are apart of. You’re also doing clients a disservice because if you get hit by a bus chances are that your documentation pales in comparison to that of most open source projects back by a community. The community will live on for large projects where as if something happens to the individual responsible for a custom system everything “dies” with them.
Every project I’ve worked on which has been custom code the idea of documentation has been basically no documentation. I don’t buy it for one minute that those rolling their own code are writing better documentation than that of Symfony of Laravel. What “people” like you are doing is building something that may be great but will be a nightmare to maintain by another individual and have huge costs associated with onboarding others. I’m not going to say open source code, frameworks, modules, plugins aren’t without their flaws but I tend to believe they have much fewer flaws than a single individuals code. Not to mention if a bug is found in one it can always be fixed and is a pull request away typically from helping others fix the same problem.
I also think that the article had it a bit backwards. It seems like everyone and their brother starts with building their own framework. However, it takes a true professional to recognize the available resources within the ecosystem that are available and use those instead of selfishly reinventing wheels. Also accepting the fact that open source code will have problems having enough humanity to fix and contribute back to the community. Once you know a programming language in and out that is the next step not building yet another framework but providing solutions to common problems that can be contributed back to the community that leverage the existing ecosystem. Being able to put ego aside and just enrich the community while also working for a client is stardum within our industry. Those that have the mentality that their code is better than everyone else are living in a fantasy land. Even if it is than you should be contributing back to the community and making people better around you and much of that starts with becoming involved and using thriving open source projects.