Modern web would best be described as a fustercluck. Web tech still hasn't caught up to most of the lessons learned in the 70s 80s and 90s. Watching web GUI tec

Modern web would best be described as a fustercluck. Web tech still hasn't caught up to most of the lessons learned in the 70s 80s and 90s. Watching web GUI technologies evolve over the past 20 years was like watching bad 70s reruns, with all the cringe and facepalm. We have enough to make a discipline out of the field, but every 20 years or so the next generation of fresh recruits brings all their bad habits in with them and then round and round we go again with the new (and horribly broken) technologies that didn't learn from the last time we did the same things and made the same mistakes in a similar way. You absolutely can control how much state you need (down to a minima, of course). The issue is not with the minimum state necessary - it's with the cowboy mentalities that lead to excessive state (and even worse - excessively complicated state interactions).