As a web developer, I feel the same way. The web has really devolved into layers and layers of crap.

Ain't that the truth.

It's been about 10 years or so since I did any web development. And yesterday we had a thread here about CSS minifying, and one of the CSS files were ~250KB. What the hell kind of abominations are people making that need 250KB of CSS?

10 years ago we had CSS minification, primarily to reduce the number of web requests. As a .net developer it was simple, you point it at your css and it combined and compressed it for you. Now the minifying is all about compiling to css, you have to run a node server to do it and the results are still more bloated than 10 years ago. Web development went off the deep end.

The results are from including all of bootstrap, even though you only use 3 parts, plus a theme that doesn't do a custom build, that overrides it all, then a couple other components with their own huge CSS, even though you're only using 1.

Without being judicious, it's easy enough to see happen.

Not to mention a few resource embeds to shave load time (fonts, svg, images, etc).

Are there ads on the web? I've not noticed … uBlock Origin is a wonderful thing!

I've been going the other way lately, back to much faster desktop apps for everything.

Then there's the desktopified apps (spotify, slack, even VS Code), which work surprisingly well. Of course when React Native desktop environments stabilize, that may become a much more preferred target.

I avoid electron apps like the plague too.

Reactive native I'm more open minded about, but I'll reserve judgment until I see how well the obey things like themeing.

I don't mind the electron apps... also, am mostly okay seeing material-ui like designs in applications even when non-native... React Native should be native to the environment, though uncertain as to how theme friendly, I haven't played with it... for my needs Cordova and Electron have been good enough so far.

But I can see how they wouldn't be the preference.