Comment by xp84

Isn’t using compressed numbers pretending that network bandwidth is the only cost of bloat?

All that JS, once decompressed, needs to be parsed and actually evaluated. That is where it hurts even people on gigabit connections.

I think frontend bloat has arrived at such an absurd level that it kind of makes me wish broadband and mobile speeds, and JS engine speeds, had paused their advancement for 15 years so that FE developers would have had to learn to write good code. Presently there is a whole generation of developers who built their whole careers in this era where you can get acceptably mediocre performance even with wildly inefficient code and an absurd amount of dependencies, most of them barely used on a given page. They’ve never been challenged to do any better, so i don’t really blame them.