Having standardized on Prettier for three years across our team, the initial productivity gains have given way to significant operational friction. The primary issue is its evolution from a simple, opinionated tool into a framework with its own ecosystem of plugins and parsers.
Our current configuration, which now supports Tailwind classes and organizes imports, has become fragile.
```json
{
"plugins": [
"prettier-plugin-tailwindcss",
"@trivago/prettier-plugin-sort-imports"
]
}
```
The plugin system is a liability. Dependency conflicts and parsing errors now consume more time than the tool saves, especially during Node version updates. The "zero configuration" promise is gone. For a team our size, the maintenance overhead now outweighs the consistency benefit.
We are evaluating a shift to Biome for formatting and linting, keeping its scope strictly to code style, and moving import sorting/organization back into the bundler or TypeScript compiler where it belongs. Prettier's value proposition diminishes sharply once you require more than its core formatting rules.