Is old tech dead?

I’m job searching right now, which means looking at a lot of potential employers’ projects. And over and over I keep finding things the community declared dead years ago.

Every year someone publishes “jQuery is dead”, but jQuery didn’t get the memo. In 2026 it’s on 77.8% of websites according to W3Techs.

PHP has been dying since 2012. Meanwhile WordPress runs 43% of the internet, and Laravel keeps shipping major releases while playing nicely with React/Vue through Inertia.js.

React had plenty of killers too: Svelte, Solid, Qwik. Each one promised to replace it, but React is still used by 83% of developers according to the State of JS 2025 survey.

GraphQL launched in 2015 promising to rewrite how APIs work entirely. It became popular, but REST didn’t go anywhere. GraphQL found its niche alongside REST, not instead of it.

Deno launched in 2020 with native TypeScript, built-in fetch, no npm, “finally done right”. Bun came in 2022 with benchmarks showing it runs several times faster than Node. In the end, Node.js is still used by 90% of developers. Node 22 got native TypeScript, and built-in fetch landed in Node 18.

Same story with npm: Yarn tried to “fix” it in 2016, pnpm in 2017, Bun brought its own package manager. npm ships with Node, and for most people that turns out to be enough.