I'm an old-school web guy. React is stupid easy, but by nature of things being easy it also encourages really bad habits.

Performance is one thing (the internet is getting slower! Impressively bad!), but also webapps are becoming so incredibly overdesigned, at the expense of the user experience.

Before we had the discrete fields of front-end engineering, design, UX, etc web design was inherently limited and we used standardized shorthands for everything across the industry. With React it's so easy to throw out best practices and try to redesign every single experience from scratch. Combine that with the Figma-fication of web design and teams can get lost making pixel perfect designs that are usability nightmares.

Let's be honest - what percentage of modern React websites actually provide a better user experience than Craigslist? It's fast, I'm not dealing with buttons that move around as a page loads, unusual text sizes at non-standard screen sizes, etc. (The famous McMaster-Carr website is another example).

Yeah, the "buttons that move as the page loads" is the single biggest thing I hate about the modern web. I go to click one, and in that instant, it's moved and replaced by a different one that I didn't want to click.

Then again, I'm hardly one to talk. The last time I wrote actual web code was JSPs in 2001. I did hack on some JS code to add dynamic table sorting to some html report pages I created later, but that's about it.. Never liked JS's idea of "we can be every programming language at once with the standards from none of them".. Sure, it's flexible, but so is a noodle..

Hill I’m willing to die on (figuratively): Most websites should be readable on w3m (or lynx, or emacs’ ewww).