Have been told by co-workers that I need to be more prescriptive and less *"you should learn your system and respect users at the margins"*, so with that in mind, a short list of things that should never be in the critical path of a new website in 2025: - React - "CSS-in-JS" with a "runtime" - Redux - Apollo - Lottie - MSAL.js - Polyfills for classes, promises, or generators - core-js, Underscore, or Lodash - Node's Buffer - Moment.js - zlib.js

A truly shocking fraction of the JS community is carrying as if nothing has happened back on the hellsite. Negotiating with myself how to feel about that (and them) is increasingly easy and final.

You are about enter another dimension. A dimension not only of sight and sound, but of mindlessness. Consider one Mr Alex Russell. He has a headache. He senses something off, but he can't put his finger on it. He's looking at web page. With a carousel. And some links. As is the style, it has three copies of React (3), between the document and two (2) iframes. None of which is shared. It's served as 200 requests across 40 connections. Or at least it's the style...in **the Twilight Zone**

It finally crystallised, after all these years. I now understand my groundhog day experience of being the first person to take traces for a high-profile service, or to read the JS a tower of bundlers and build tools "optimised": the JS community (principally the Over-Reactors) are theorists. Web Application Theorists. WATs. They do not understand how it's going because *looking* is discouraged. These are not engineers. They do not engineer because they don't accept constraints as legitimate.

The correct response to realizing computers are fast is not to make your software slow, because: a.) you won't benefit as much as you hope b.) if you break pro-user norms, so will every other site/app/library, and your thing will feel slow even if it's "fine" in isolation c.) HW bounty is not evenly distributed, so your product becomes less usable non-linearly below some resource floor Pretending constraints don't exist is not engineering, it's bullshitting.

I've come to understand what's happening in frontend's decade-long failure to deliver decent user experiences as a sort of epistemic closure. I'm calling it "frameworkism", and the epicenter is now React. Here's a lot of words on why we should all reject it, and what the post-React world should look like:

Infrequently Noted

If Not React, Then What? - Infrequently Noted

Frameworkism is now the dominant creed of today's frontend discourse, and it's bullshit. We owe it to ourselves and to our users to reject dogma an...