If I'd have to spend my career developing and attending to a single product, a set of libraries would be all I need. I can fill in the blanks and connect them and write and maintain any missing pieces.

However I work for customers, many different projects, and I'm more than happy to work with Ruby on Rails, that enforces a common structure to every project, lets me predict where files are and what they do, etc. The advantage is in all the time not spent on learning from scratch every single project. I can start working on the very first day. Even Django, which is mostly anarchy compared to Rails, is better than complete anarchy with every single project using different tools and having a different architecture.

Furthermore projects started with Sinatra and Flask and similar tools quickly evolve into something as complex as Rails and Django, with tons of home made fragile code. There is never the time to make them robust, because nobody is working full time on those projects for years. Basically frameworks allow developers to multitask among projects which is great for consultants and also for customers, because they don't have to pay for the extra developers.

Perhaps "frameworks don't compose" and "frameworks shape how you code" are actually good features, not a problem. Where are frameworks the most popular? Probably for web services (e.g. Spring Boot for Java). You don't need them to compose because you will only have one.

That you are forced (or at least strongly nudged) to code in a certain way is good because that means that all your web services are at least superificially familiar to all developers at the organization. That special service composed from many libraries? Impossible to work on without significant time investment.

I suppose though that if you are in a domain where you actually would want a library, but all that's on offer are frameworks, and you actually need to compose them, then yes, that seems problematic.

Expanding, a framework allows components to work together, the OS being the most common example. Most languages also define a framework for the program to fit into. Startup initialization, main routine, shutdown, memory allocation. Without this it would be hard to use libraries.

The click bait title worked on me but come on, it’s like saying screwdrivers are evil or something. A framework is a tool that’s appropriate in some circumstances and not others.