This is why I think the concept of soft and hard dependencies is useful. As a dev, it's nice that I can track what my users are doing with GA, but I would rath

This is why I think the concept of soft and hard dependencies is useful. As a dev, it's nice that I can track what my users are doing with GA, but I would rather my users be able to use my application. This is definitely a 'soft' dependency because I do not have a hard requirement to use its functionality. If a critical piece of my application (a 'hard' dependency) fails to load then that is a bigger problem. I don't think we have to degrade gracefully for every possible failure, but failing to render anything is a really bad failure mode. Your lazy/efficient dev is actually just providing a good user experience; if something bad has gone wrong, let the user know so they can refresh etc. The thing about third-party scripts is that you have no control over them at all. By their nature, you can't even bundle them (that is a workaround for some options though)! If your users are deploying your web-app behind the firewall, and outbound requests are blocked, if you don't handle these requests failing then the entire app becomes unusable regardless of if they use ad blocking or not.