Only if they weren't using Turbopack.

Of course it should be mentioned, it's a basic disclaimer.

I don't know the situation now, but a while ago there were a lot of pushback using Next.js because it was not easy to use all features if not hosted on Vercel.

HTMX is great when your web interface is just a representation of a server state.

If web interface is an application backed by a remote state HTMX falls apart.

None of the above. It is a utility (I guess framework maybe) for a feature that was cool in ASP.NET back in 2005. But that is it's charm. It is just JS swapping out the dom for you.

I'm not insanely deep into frontend, I mostly just pick up React and call it a day, but it seems like this is also over-engineered?

I've seen vanilla JS before, and I just know I wouldn't want to do the housekeeping that comes with it. People claim it's less work because it' simpler, but I fully expect myself to rewrite the thing at least twice, only to give up because I have no actual mental model anymore of how it works.

Isn't the main problem that the building blocks the modern web is based on are not a good fit for what we do with it?

CSS is a total mess. HTML is a mess. JS is okay, but is not a high quality language.

We would save so much time and money if we would have a modern base to build on. Sadly this will probably never happen, because company interests will try to corrupt the process and therefore destroy it.

This is my understanding too - tools like react are like microservices - they’re a technical solution to an organisational problem. HTML/css/JavaScript is an imperfect abstraction, so we got bootstrap. Then we got client side frameworks which introduced a build step, and then we got asset bundles, optimisers, linters, validators, tree shakers, package managers, validators for your package managers. All of these monkey patched around the actual problem with more abstractions, and the end result is what we have now.

Not that backend is any better - microservices everywhere, must scale to Facebook traffic even if we only have 10 customers, etc. Saying this as a backend dev

Like using SPAs for classical Web development, and then they rediscover PHP.

It’s mind blowing when you check the generated code, because it goes over 50 elements deep for a simple looking website.

Makes me think that there’s no way this is computationally efficient either.

Same reason why 90% of websites have serious UX issues and constant bugs. This and ad frameworks.

And underenginered at the same time !

I don't think any C compiler has been single pass for the last 20 years. Typescript's analyses are also not that complicated, it's just that the typescript type checker is written in js. Iirc the actual ts -> js part is pretty fast with some of the more recent compilers.

That's not the point...

I disagree - this is an excuse. Even the post we’re commenting in now shows that it’s a series of poor abstractions and bad tooling that takes way too long to do the basics, combined with a language and ecosystem that encourages this behaviour . They saw a 5x speed up by changing tools while still using a JavaScript framework so it’s clearly possible for it to not be complete nonsense.