This is a big problem, but calling it over-engineering seems too generous. I'd characterise it as under-engineering: Developers unwilling or unable to give prop

This is a big problem, but calling it over-engineering seems too generous. I'd characterise it as under-engineering: Developers unwilling or unable to give proper consideration to non-functional requirements such as performance and design an optimised solution, and instead just layering on more and more dependencies. There's a happy medium between serving a single <img> tag and this monstrosity. It would be totally feasible to use PWA techniques and a lightweight JS framework to build an image host that was performant and still provided all the other features Imgur does. But let's face facts: It's not going to happen, no matter how many angry Twitter threads get posted to Hacker News. The web platform is completely unsuited to mobile, and there are simply too many perverse incentives in commercial web development to expect that most developers will expend the effort to build an optimised PWA when they can slap something together with React, knowing it'll work fine on the CEO's iPhone on office wifi. The only real fix would be a complete reinvention of the web to fix the myriad design flaws. That is what Google's AMP was supposed to be, but people seem to hate it and see it is proprietary and evil. Maybe it is, but from a technical perspective, it's likely the only kind of solution that has a chance of working.