For the curious, the rest of the types:

Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.

Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.

Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.

Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action.

Start as close to the end as possible.

Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them—in order that the reader may see what they are made of.

Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.

Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

The greatest American short story writer of my generation was Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964). She broke practically every one of my rules but the first. Great writers tend to do that.

Is there no room for describing the setting? Must every utterance that sets the atmosphere also advance the plot or reveal character? Is there no room for mood?

The problem JS development is facing is the same most languages might go through. The "Magic" that solves all problems, frameworks and solutions that solve small issues at a great cost.

Lots of developers don't even say they are JS devs but React devs or something. This is normal given that the bandwidth and power of targets are so large nowadays. Software is like a gas, it will fill all the space you can give it since there is no reason to optimize anything if it runs ok.

I've spent countless hours optimising javascript and css to work across devices that were slow and outdated but still relevant (IE7, 8 and 9 were rough years). Cleverness breads in restrictive environments where you want to get the most out of it. Modern computers are so large that its hard for you to hit the walls when doing normal work.

Every cargo install (rust) I've down downloads 300 to 700 packages

Every C++ app I install in linux requires 250 packages

Every python app I install and then pip install requirements uses 150 packages.

"Do you think it could be inherent to the language?"

Not to the language but its users. Not to bash them, but most of them did not study IT on a university, did not learn about the KISS principle etc.

They just followed some tutorials to hack together stuff, now automated via LLM's.

So in a way the cause is the language as it is so easy to use. And the ecosystem grew organically from users like this - and yes, the ecosystem is full of bloat.

(I think claude nowdays is a bit smarter, but when building standalone html files without agents, I remember having to always tell chatgpt to explicitely NOT pull in yet another libary, but use plain vanilla js for a standard task, which usually works better and cleaner with the same lines of code or maybe 2 or 3 more for most cases. The standard was to use libaries for every new functionality )

> All software has bloat, but npm packages and web apps are notorious for it. Do you think it could be inherent to the language?

It sure seems like it is because JS devs, by and large, suck at programming. C has a pretty sparse standard library, but you don't see C programmers creating shared libraries to determine if a number is odd, or to add whitespace to a string.