It is *intense* just how badly the JS/React brainworms have infected the frontend community.
Every single NYT story page has *both* a 437KiB (1.5MiB unzipped) *and* a 474KiB (1.7MiB) JS file, to display ~50K of text. It isn't ad bloat. It isn't tracking. It's this sort of bunk:
@catraxx @slightlyoff If you have to use react, I found this flowchart by Dan Abramov to be helpful - "React Makes You Sad": https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/gh/gaearon/react-makes-you-sad@1377b6a6cdc644adfea6bf238f06c75d33ed6f1e/fatigue.svg
But if you don't have to use it, vanilla JS and CSS value functions & flexbox can do some pretty incredible things these days.
@janeadams Since I'm not in the industry and basically just an entrenched-enthusiast, my heralding matters for about zipola... BUT... I've still been singing the praises of just what's possible, manageable and performant with plain browser API, observers, js proxy and custom elements these days.
Usually to glassy-eyes that immediately return to heavy monolithic React.
But I'm trying. :D
Alex Russell
catraxx 
Jane Adams
jell