> a) developers don't taking any time to optimize, lazy load, cache, minimize dependencies...

> (This is partly on React, or may be on the culture around React that has made all of this normal and acceptable.)

Yes, that, too. But you are forgetting that React makes all that opimizing work necessary in the first place.

Networks are fast. Machines are crazy fast. Almost 30 years ago I was doing on-line adaptation of Postscript print files. So some form input and re-rendering the Postscript with the updates from the form values. Basically instantaneous.

> Networks are fast.

Well, it depends on what you mean by “fast”: bandwidth or latency? While the bandwidth has improved enormously over the years, latency… not so much. And it never will due to the simple fact that the speed of light is limited.

Most of the slowness seems to come about by treating latency as something that doesn’t matter (because the testing is done on a local, low-latency network) or will improve radically over time because bandwidth did (which it will not).

Unfortunately, React wants to be both a rendering library and also manage state by tying it to the component lifetime, which encourages cascaded fetching - exactly the kind of workload that is sensitive to latency.

> Yes, that, too. But you are forgetting that React makes all that opimizing work necessary in the first place.

Isn't the runtime state optimization the only responsibility of React. It's a library. The rest goes for Vite, Deno et al.

Low powered android devices are a thing. Networks outside of Metro US, EU, and parts of Asia, are also a thing.

Check out google maps there’s more to the world than your open office.