Some of the time, web developers are using CDNs because they want to save 5 minutes from downloading and hosting it on their own servers, or they want to not ha

Some of the time, web developers are using CDNs because they want to save 5 minutes from downloading and hosting it on their own servers, or they want to not have to add it to their package.json. I've noticed this with novice web developers, where they just want to get something working up as fast as possible. This practice of linking to a CDN or external URL for a js library used to be heavily discouraged, called "hotlinking", but it seems like many javascript libraries now are fine with it (even encouraging it). I see a similar problem with Google Analytics or Google Fonts, where you're sacrificing user privacy and agency in exchange for developer convenience. In a slightly more privacy-centric era (perhaps in a few years), I think people will consider this practice unethical, as the web developer is sending their visitors off to fetch and run javascript code from a third party's computer. The security, usability, and privacy problems noted by the article are not worth the few minutes saved by the developer.