> Web technology and JavaScript became the dumpster slut of software ecosystems. I think an additional problem with the JavaScript ecosystem specifically is ex

> Web technology and JavaScript became the dumpster slut of software ecosystems. I think an additional problem with the JavaScript ecosystem specifically is external resources are extremely easy to access and their cost is usually borne by end user resources. Therefore they're too tempting for many developers to avoid. Unfortunately the runtime environment of the end user rarely matches that of the developers and seemingly "cheap" resource access at development/test time isn't cheap for the end user. JavaScript is happy to pull in some library hosted on some third party service at runtime. For the developer/tester this ends up cached by the browser and/or at the edge of the CDN. A developer may also have topologically close CDN endpoints. This inspires them to pull willy nilly from third party libraries because to them they're cheap to access and they save time writing some utility function. The same goes for CSS, APIs, or media resources. With JavaScript the delivery is a client issue and costs can be pushed entirely onto the client. If pulling in an external resource(s) costs a developer non-trivial money to store and serve they'll put more effort into tree shaking or other delivery optimizations. They may omit it entirely. I think this massively contributes to the LEGO piece construction of a lot of web apps. It also contributes to performance robbing things like tag managers that insert a bunch of incongruent plug-ins only at runtime from an unbounded number of sources.