Yeah, maybe. But I'm also not counting the times I worked on a hot reload enabled project and I wasn't sure if it actually reloaded or maybe there was an error somewhere that made the whole thing stop working, and so I just manually refreshed. It's just not that amazing, and it certainly not worth a few days of setting up. Would someone really start a project from scratch and then spend days on getting hot reload to work? I'd never want to hire that person honestly, nor to develop in such a fragile platform.
Hot reload is nice, but there's nothing revolutionary about it that justifies more than an hour of getting things to work.
Oh no I agree. It's far more painful than it needs to be.
I've found productivity boosts in shortening the feedback loop. A tighter feedback loop makes it easier to get into flow.
But days of effort to get a simple thing working defeats the purpose. My worst days are when I look over the day and I've spent it fixing a build process - there's no flow in that. I could just bite the bullet and still get into flow albeit less smoothly but still. That's how I worked for years.
I just wanted to point out it isn't as simple as eliminating a refresh. There is a gain behind that.
Hot reload is nice, but there's nothing revolutionary about it that justifies more than an hour of getting things to work.