look, i know it's a thing where someone who doesn't understand the problem at hand (me) looks at what people are doing (webdevs) and goes "what is going on"

but i have lived through countless webdevs complaining about the "mysterious asset pipeline" breaking again and all i can think of is "we have reinvented C++ but with a whole different class of format string like issues" when i see what absolute torment passes for a build process

we have learned nothing from automake and autoconf, nothing

look i know there's reasons behind "we bundle the entire thing up only then to split it back out into pieces, automatically" but

so much of web dev feels like "complex ways to do what you did before for no meaningful benefit other than the satisfaction of solving a harder problem than you needed to"

at some point you have to ask why there are webapps that send over a docker container's worth of code to insert html into a web page, where the html is rendered server side for speed, of course

also i cannot get over that a lot of these approaches come from performance reasons

it's like "why are you hydrating the dom through batched async requests to the server side rendering cache" "ah it would be slow otherwise "

"why's it slow" "well, in order to hydrate the dom via async requests we're sending over about 20 megs of compressed javascript"