It's been bleak for a while, but I think we are coming round the bend. For example Next does a pretty good job of code splitting and offers rendering solutions

It's been bleak for a while, but I think we are coming round the bend. For example Next does a pretty good job of code splitting and offers rendering solutions from 100% client side to 100% static, as in no React runtime at all. Building a performant Next site that only pulls in the JS it needs is quite doable now. React server side components seem at least interesting here. I still have no experience with them but they do at least claim to tackle some of these issues. As I understand it other frameworks like Svelte and Vue have been exploring these ideas too. I think the bleakness will continue and there will be a long tail of it. But I really do think better websites are coming and in many cases are already here.