JavaScript broke the web (and called it progress)

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Blame: JavaScript vs People and Culture

  • Many argue JavaScript itself didn’t “break” the web; poor training, weak engineering practices, and marketing pressures did.
  • Others counter that giving client code power over navigation, rendering, and UX inevitably enabled breakage, so the platform design shares blame.
  • Browsers’ tolerance for broken code is seen as removing accountability: bad sites “sort of work” instead of failing loudly.

Frameworks, SPAs, and Self‑Inflicted Complexity

  • Strong criticism of SPA frameworks and “JS for everything” for blogs and simple sites: reinvented routing, navigation, templating, and caching poorly.
  • Some note that SPAs make things like history, links, and buttons 4× harder to get right, driving regressions in basic browser behaviors.
  • Others respond that popular frameworks (React, Vue, Svelte, etc.) handle history and links correctly if used properly; most problems are developer errors.

Performance, Bandwidth, and UX

  • Complaints about megabytes of JS, slow loads on low-end phones and weak mobile networks, and JS build pipelines rivaling C++ complexity.
  • Defenders say many modern web apps (Gmail, Fastmail, YouTube, etc.) clearly outperform old native/desktop clients for many users.
  • Some argue latency-sensitive users benefit from well-designed SPAs that keep interactions local and sync in the background.

Accessibility and Semantics

  • Long list of failures (broken back buttons, uncopyable content, keyboard traps, shifting layouts) is widely agreed to be real.
  • Disagreement on cause: one side blames SPA patterns and “anything can be a button/link” culture; the other says the same damage was done with server-rendered HTML and is purely about discipline and semantics.

Ecosystem, APIs, and Platform Design

  • Critics highlight JS’s historic lack of a standard library and awkward early DOM/XHR APIs as drivers of huge frameworks.
  • Others emphasize that the deeper problem is the ad‑hoc, inconsistent web API stack (graphics, audio, clipboard, fullscreen, filesystem, etc.), not JS the language.
  • There’s nostalgia for simpler document-centric web design and interest in “HTML-first with JS sprinkles” approaches (progressive enhancement, htmx, islands frameworks).

Industry Incentives and Churn

  • Many recount periods of extreme framework churn and resume‑driven/leadership‑driven rewrites, especially in 2015–2020.
  • Some say the ecosystem has since stabilized and that JS the language is relatively stable; unnecessary rewrites are more organizational than technical.

Monetization, SEO, and Meta‑Discussion

  • Several argue ads, tracking, and SEO are the real culprits behind bloated, hostile experiences, with JS as the vehicle.
  • The article is criticized as clickbait, possibly AI- or SEO-influenced; others defend its core critique while rejecting the nostalgia or hyperbole.