This topic seems to come up on Hacker News every few months or so. Not saying the post is necessarily wrong there, but it's certainly something people here love

This topic seems to come up on Hacker News every few months or so. Not saying the post is necessarily wrong there, but it's certainly something people here love discussing nonetheless. As for why front end development may be a bit of a mess here? Well, it's really a problem that doesn't have just one cause. On the one hand, business pressures likely have a huge impact here. Companies love analytics, tracking, ads, etc, all of which contribute greatly to the issue of slow loading, broken sites. If you include everything and the kitchen sink, then things will clash or time out or break. There's also an issue with businesses focusing on speed and working getting done quickly rather than well. If you're given unrealistic deadlines, and the feature set is changed midway through development because some manager/sales team thought of a shiny new idea that needs implementing... well it seems like optimisation, usability, etc often end up on the cutting room floor. And yes there's a bit of envy from developers towards Facebook/Google/Apple/whatever there too, and a need to 'test out the shiny new toys' so they can potentially get hired there in future. I suspect CV padding is definitely why SPAs are way more common than they used to be, and why simple static or server rendered sites seem nearly nonexistent now.