Skeleton screens are a great example of bad design being popularized because a couple people in power set arbitrary requirements. "It has to start fast" is a co

Skeleton screens are a great example of bad design being popularized because a couple people in power set arbitrary requirements. "It has to start fast" is a common requirement (a certification requirement on some game consoles, in fact) which leads to skeleton screens, and it juices certain metrics in a way that appeals to metrics-driven leadership, so eventually you get them everywhere and it hides the fact that your application takes forever to actually load and be usable. There are a few different pieces of software I'm stuck using that will often show me a skeleton for multiple seconds while I wait to actually be able to use the app. Just show me a loading screen and a progress bar. Some people in the browser space haven't lost their minds and track things like how often the layout of a page changes during loading, how often it wiggles around, etc - which penalizes skeletons and other bad tricks, as it should. But this particular sensibility hasn't caught on elsewhere.