You should have included the very next sentence in my quote. There is a difference between using React and "SPA-izing" everything in sight. React is a library.

You should have included the very next sentence in my quote. There is a difference between using React and "SPA-izing" everything in sight. React is a library. It doesn't mandate an SPA as its use-case, and, frankly, I've had great success sprinkling React[0] into single pages that need that extra sparkle. Once you move beyond filtering a list or showing/hiding things, the pros quickly start to outweigh the cons. Could some of those pages be made a bit more efficient or have a smaller download? Probably. But nobody notices and I am able to iterate on them quickly because they follow the same general structure as the bigger applications I've built. To be clear, I'm not suggesting everyone use React for simple pages but criticizing the tool is a non-sequitur. You are kind of making my point above that all of this "modern JS is ruining the internet" criticism is being levied towards the wrong thing. Like you said, blame the bootcamps for churning out developers that know nothing else about how to develop a web page. Then blame industry for not training them the basics of their craft. [0] Or preact (https://preactjs.com/ https://preactjs.com/). Which is way smaller (3kb)! At this size, it's crazy to use anything else. How big is jQuery again? 20 times that size?