I still contend that silver-bullet-chasing is at the heart of a lot of web bloat. You have a "startup founder" (or fortune 500 middle-manager) who believes tha

I still contend that silver-bullet-chasing is at the heart of a lot of web bloat. You have a "startup founder" (or fortune 500 middle-manager) who believes that he has a world-changing (or next-quarter revenue generating) idea, he just needs a couple of grubby programmers to type it into the computer for him. Now, he knows that these grubby computer geeks are far, far, beneath him, and that anything they know how to do must be trivially simple to do, he just didn't take the right classes in college to know which buttons to press to make the world-changing computer thing happen. So the programmers tell him it's going to take a few months. "A few months!" He explodes. "I need this by Thursday! I thought you worthless lot called yourself computer dwee- er, programmers!" So he casts them out of his sight and starts googling "how to program really fast". He comes across Angular. He doesn't know what "Angular" means, but google says it programs really fast, and google is smarters than those dorks who can't even make a website in two days. So he says, "here, use Angular, it makes things go really fast. This is the silver bullet we're searching for". Of course, Angular depends on a few MB of libraries - mostly because when somebody was creating a table controller or whatever the hell for Angular, he or somebody who had some sway over him told _him_ that these other dependencies would let him program real fast. And so on, down the line, until finally something bottoms out into some actual javascript that actually does something. But because making web pages load quickly and be pleasant to use and not choke the internet infrastructure is a "nice to have" but getting this world-changing thing "to market" is a matter of life and death, that nerdy sounding load-testing shit is pushed off until the very end until there's no time to do it and who cares because you can't stand the sight of those slovenly programmers any more anyway and if they knew what they were doing, they'd have gotten it right in the first place.