There's a lot of good deep questions and challenges here. There's a lot of general anger and rage against the web, against JavaScript, but there's specific complaints that are much more real here:
> It doesn’t matter if you’re publishing a blog post or an ecommerce site – the stack is the same. Heavy, abstract, engineered to the edge of usefulness. And nobody understands it. Not fully.
That so many folks are using the same stack seems much much more likely to mean that people do understand it. Pax Reactus feels absurd but the reason it's so saturated is because it's what we know, because it's what's done elsewhere. It's done because lots of people do know it.
> And the worst part? Most of this complexity exists just to retrofit things we used to get by default: routing, metadata, caching, templating, layout.
We didn't get a lot of these by default though. We built those http services. We build template/layout engines for the server side. To a lesser extend we build routers, caches (those have been part of httpd services for a long time).
But it's still very near to me that our frameworks for SPAs (single page apps) often make us bring these concerns in each time. URL routing should be super super super common, to avoid degrading the user experience, but so often it's an afterthought. And it's not really the developers/company's fault entirely, if it's not foremost in the framework design. Its not an add-on its core to having good web architecture.
There was a defense for many years that react wasnt a framework, that it was a library. It only wanted to concern itself with rendering aspects. It left you to do a lot on your own, like state. That's both true, but it's wild how much negative space we haven't seen well integrated, how few good examples we have of a batteries included thoughtful well constructed front end.
To steer towards some kind of closing… it does feel tumultuous and chaotic. Technically we've been in transition and not making a ton of real visible progress since 2020 (react suspense is a good technique but feels obvious in retrospect, rsc is a huge slow shift), transition towards handling the SPA well.
But I'm so happy we are here. This is so different, so much more than what programming has been. HTML, CSS and JS are such an rich and capable platform, an interesting rich front end that displays anywhere on any device with secure and interesting interconnection to the world, that we can architect apps out of however we might dream. Very little seems to hold us back beyond our craft, beyond how we might imagine making these machines. So far in our lurching forward we have created such a richer connected world,… and fairly impressively direct toolkits that have shifted us from craftsmen who understood every little bit and every tool, to an industrialized workforce using advanced React Compilers. I don't love this hyper industrialization, but it's still amazing & powerful; I resist the part of me that wants to pastoralize the web, that has any sympathies for the very ardent very loud clambor against the web, that wants to see only simple pages again, that thinks it should all be torn down.
I really worry that the rage and disdain spreads so readily, on so many topics, & here where I still feel a glow of hope, even as things escalate & go unresolved, even as it feels mostly not to be honing in on really good answers (why are we still so broadly doing all work on the main thread?!). The anti-vocates pile into comments again and again, with endless energy to blast and destroy. I want to chime in to say, yes, it's complicated, but I love and cherish Dynamic HTML still, and I look forward to seeing ongoingly how we architect apps out of this base material.
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