Comment by bastawhiz

> The flashes signify actual changes

The loading state is indistinguishable from the page crashing. Did the JavaScript fail, or is the connection just slow?

> animated skeleton boxes or element level spinners

Good news! Browsers have low motion settings. Any programmer worth their salt will respect this and the skeletons won't be animated.

> Then the flash of content actually means something.

On the contrary, if the content is loaded in multiple parts (in my own application, I split the loading into multiple requests: one is cacheable across multiple pages, one is cheap, one is expensive), you either need to not render anything until everything is loaded (bad: the user can't interact with the parts that loaded first), or the page jumps around as content loads in. Skeletons fix this. UI elements in the middle don't end up being 0px tall and moving the stuff below them around nearly as much. How annoying is it to nearly click on something and the page jumps violently and you mis-click?

It honestly sounds like you just don't like lazy programming. That's very fair. Skeletons done right just mean the page is the correct layout while they're partially loaded. Without that, the content is literally unusable (you can't read it interact with things that are jumping all over the place).