It's kind of disingenuous if not deliberately misleading to say
> Otto Kekäläinen (former Software Development Manager at AWS)
He also happens to have a past involvement with MariaDB foundation.
Furthermore, his article about MySQL not being "true open source" is honestly laughable when you consider the context of his (and this author's) suggested replacement.
> It is like fast food, not every cares about farm to table
I mean, a "colorful fat choncker" website is literally the opposite of fast food - its slower to arrive, and focuses way too much on appearances.
In this analogy, the website using these ridiculous abstractions is more like Salt Bae or whatever idiotic trend has replaced him. All glitz, zero substance, slower, and for no apparent reason.
The fast food equivalent is stuff like the Google home page: it doesn't validate, is actively harmful to you, the community, and the planet but is immensely popular.
Everyone always says slower and bloat and bad etc etc but it is all relative. Not everyone is an eng who scoffs at waiting another 100ms.
I do like your analogy tho. It is better. Most people want that trendy experience or fast food. Still, both exist because the market demands it be so despite how much it tilts a subset.
I worked in first level IT support and I think most people don't even consider it consciously like that. They read the news at that page. That page changes. A lot has to happen to piss them off enough to make them go. They habitually click away fifty windows a day without reading them anyways.
But people do notice if something just works on a subconscious level and that colors their perception of your project/brand/page or whatever. Even my totally tech-illiterate father actively complains about junk interfaces like the one at Temu. But he goes there for the sweet deals. I just wonder if it wouldn't work out better for them if the page was snappy and allowed a person to visit more product pages.
And one mistake you make is to think you need a megabyte of javascript to create a junk look. You can easily do that with HTML and CSS alone, including animations and all.
The way I see it the causal arrow points in the other way: successful sites tend to get bloaty, but they do no et successful because of it, but despite it.
And by bloaty I don't mean it as a problem if the page does a lot. Bloaty means you use a intricate Rube-Goldberg-machine to in the end do very basic things. Like displaying a popup, which can be done with a single line of Javascript, but is for some reason done using the amount of code that would result in a veritable, heavyweight book if printed.
I mean, that much is obvious just based on casual reading of a few articles/discussions about "modern" front-end dev.
I am 100% convinced that "Modern" front end developers are in fact, afraid of CSS and HTML. Like, "it will steal my eyeballs and look back at my face with them" scared.
Nothing else explains things like this, tailwind, JSX components, etc. Nothing. There is no explanation besides absolute morbid fear of the underlying technology - because the browser support has improved immensely but apparently they're all deathly scared of using it.
Before you tell me that I don't know what challenges these problems solve: I was primarily doing front-end development.... 20ish years ago. One of my first jobs in the space was adapting the client side code for a J2EE app - mostly this meant removing an IKEA worth of tables and using CSS - in IE6 of all fucking things. Subsequently I created reusable UI frontend components (i.e. output some HTML, maybe this little bit of corresponding JS, you'll get a usable interactive components in a browser) for two different organisations.
I have said it before and I'll say it again. I think JavaScript developers heard about (or saw over someone's shoulder) how J2EE guys had ant/etc build toolchains, and had abstraction like FactoryFactoryImplementationFactoryBuilderFactory and said HEY THAT LOOKS COOL, and if it's harder to understand they can't fire me!!
It's like NIH syndrome but for an entire community of people whose primary goal is chasing the shiny, followed closely by resume padding.
Look, do what works for you obviously but this just reinforces my view that the people who see "AI Code agents" as a useful thing, are the people who don't know how to write code themselves.
For the same reason things like Image Playground/etc seem magical/appealing to non-artists (myself included): we don't know how to do it ourselves, so it feels empowering.
Or more close to home: it's the same reason that developers are so in love with clicking some buttons in the <insert cloud mega provider> dashboard in spite of the costs, lock-in, more costs, yet more costs, and of course the extra costs.
As with those choosing "cloud" services they don't need, here too there will no doubt be a lucrative market to fix the shit once people realise that there's a reason experts charge the way they do.
On macOS too. On both operation systems 99% apps do though. Maybe its 99.9% on macOS vs 99.8% on Windows. But I'm using HiDPI on both and it was a long time ago that I encountered an app that didn't support it.
The entire point of rubber duck debugging is that the other side literally cannot respond - it's an inanimate object, or even a literal duck/animal.
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