Why You Should Ditch JavaScript
Too Long; Didn't Read
Yes, it's true; we are breaking the web!
Remember all the promises that single-page applications gave us roughly a decade ago? As Stefan Tilkov predicted in his insightful article, "Why I Hate Your Single Page App", SPAs have failed to deliver on their promises. In fact, modern web development using frameworks like React has made websites worse. The obsession with interactivity and developer experience has come at the expense of user experience.
Also, others are noticing this trend. Alex Russell, in his recent blog post, "The Market for Lemons," highlights the failures of "modern" web development over the past decade. Despite the community's invention of dozens of reasons to ignore the contradictions and failures of their stacked rationalizations, the evidence continues to mount that this approach is an expensive failure.
As a developer, it's time to stop prioritizing developer experience over user experience. Instead, we must focus on web performance, keeping things simple, and creating websites that load quickly and efficiently.