I don’t want to be the neophobe in the room but I sometimes wonder if we’re living in a collective delusion that the current toolchain is great when it’s really just morbidly complex. More JavaScript to fix JavaScript concerns the hell out of me.
I've been feeling this hard lately. When we are talking something like WordPress, we care about a few metrics. Page load speed and size being the primary. Memory usage and performance on server matter, but often — sadly – much less.
However, when we are talking the client, the browser, much more should matter.
I am responsible for the code that goes into the machine, I do not want to shirk the responsibility of what comes out. Blind faith in tools to fix our problems is a risky choice. Maybe “risky” is the wrong word, but it certainly seems that we move the cost of our compromises to the client and we, speaking from personal experience, rarely inspect the results.
Yeah, we also rarely analyze the browser memory usage or repaint counts of our pages. I had my laptop fan turn in this morning as I quickly opened a half a dozen tabs from ComicBook.com and they all auto-loaded dozens of trackers and started playing video. Each tab. Safari instantly ran up gigs of memory and my CPU hated me.
But this is modern web development. Who gives a shit anymore?