Comment by whstl

A team I worked with once optimized a website, and cut about 400k of cruft, down to under 200k total.

I did shit that was career-damaging, such as deciding not using heavy libraries that a platform team was pushing me to do (thus affecting their OKRs). I had to deal with designers complaining that removing JS didn't allow the special animation they wanted. The works.

We did it, and we managed to even score a few positions in Google.

Right after that, someone from Marketing added a few dozen random "pixels" to Tag Manager "because that's how Marketing is done", forcing us to adopt a cookie banner and bringing the lighthouse score to half of what it was.

Notice: The pixel was collecting data but it wasn't being used by anyone. There weren't ever any marketing campaigns involving the website.

Eventually the person was fired by the CEO for not bringing results, and we managed to remove the pixels, but by them the damage was done.