> Why? Just so developers can show off that feeling of how awesome they are for using some incredibly complex framework. ... I'm not sure what's responsible for

> Why? Just so developers can show off that feeling of how awesome they are for using some incredibly complex framework. ... I'm not sure what's responsible for this "love of bloat", but IMHO we should be teaching developers how to do more with less, and not the complete opposite as seemingly happening today. I think you're misplacing the cause into developers. Developer's want to use the SPA framework because certain magnitudes of "application like UI" become maintainence nightmares for teams who stick with jQuery or use youmightnotneedjQuery. The reason they end up bloated or with random framework-supported elements broken (back button, etc.) is from what I call MVP culture. AIM and IRC were perfectly fine in the early 2000s, but instead of upgrading them for 2010+ they were abandoned or stripmined of value (Skype). Now we have slack, discord, flock etc.. releasing MVPs. Except apparently, they are perpetual MVPs. Many industries are encountering this. Developers at large are not permitted to rewrite in native languages, optimize any non-blocking performance issue, fix bugs that don't affect the bottom line. Everyone's trying to disrupt an industry so they can vendor lock in high profit rents. When we finish switching from typescript to reasonML and decide to switch from reasonML to Nim/kotlin-native, MVP culture will still be there to tell developers not to fix the broken back button.