> We were told writing apps with an HTML-first, SSR-first, progressively enhanced mindset, using our preferred language/tech stack of choice, was outdated and b

> We were told writing apps with an HTML-first, SSR-first, progressively enhanced mindset, using our preferred language/tech stack of choice, was outdated and bad for users. That was a lie. I didn't like using the statically-served web and I especially didn't enjoy developing with the HTML-via-AJAX approach back in the day. Like it or not there's a lot of additional interactivity which JS affords us that is nowadays taken for granted by users - advanced validation in real time being just one of them. That being said: > There has been a small but mighty ecosystem of “influencers” peddling a sort of “pop culture developer abstractions” ethos on the web whether it’s about React, or CSS-in-JS, or Tailwind CSS, or “serverless”, or “microservices”, or (fill in the blank really)—and they’re continuing to gaslight and obfuscate the actual debates that matter. 100% this. I've met people who were high on this sort of koolaid and there was really no reasoning with them. Interestingly, it's mostly the React community. They seem to bravely solve problems unknown in other frameworks - CSS especially was largely solved everywhere else. I'm happy that next-generation frameworks like Svelte or Solid picked up on mistakes made in the previous decade and largely don't repeat them. You have progressive enchantment and predictable abstractions. But chiefly they have something I never thought I would see again on the front-end: a meaningful, readable stack trace.