> The organic evolution of the web today has made the web worse not better and caused incredible amounts of waste I think this is a very subjective take. There

> The organic evolution of the web today has made the web worse not better and caused incredible amounts of waste I think this is a very subjective take. There is also a strong argument that the web is much better today because of modern frameworks and technologies. The web has shifted from being a place for basic content and documents to a full-blown application platform. 10-15 years ago, if a certain application was only built for (say) macOS, well, tough luck! You won’t be able to use it. Today, many popular applications can be used in the browser on any device and any operating system. (Examples like full office suites including MS office and Google docs, or photo editing apps, or music streaming platforms, or video conferencing.) That’s a pretty incredible advantage and improvement to the general state of software, and it’s a very strong improvement for users who no longer need to worry about incompatible software or installation processes. I would argue that this advancement would not have happened without frameworks. Or at the very least, it brought about frameworks. Since the web platform itself is not designed for applications, any large application will probably end up writing some sort of abstraction on DOM rendering and state management, just to make it halfway maintainable. So if we want web applications, which are very beneficial in many circumstances, frameworks and tooling are a part of that. Of course bundle size is still a problem to worry about. It’s a problem inherent to the benefit of the platform. Typical software can make the bundle as big as they want, and you download and install it once. The web platform forces you to care about the size in a way that just isn’t necessary for other platforms. “Modern JS” is really not what is making the web worse. What’s making the web worse is ads, tracking, platform-lock-in, big monopolies, censorship, spam, poor content safety practices, etc. Like, of course you don’t need a big framework for your blog or basic content site. It’s all about choosing the tool for the job. Half the time, the blogger probably just wanted to play around with a new technology. It really doesn’t matter that much for small little projects that are just people playing around. Bundle size is important when you have a big enough user base and really have a need to optimize for poor internet connection and slower devices — but it’s just bundle size. You’d get even bigger bundle sizes without using modern tools like webpack. The bundle size comes from the larger types of apps we’re building now that we didn’t used to build, not from web frameworks specifically. IMO, that makes bundle sizes an important, but relatively small aspect of “problems related to the web.”