Well, sure. But HN is one of the few major websites that uses plain old HTML. At other websites, developers have very little leverage. The people pushing for bloated websites are managers / executives, not devs. Hence, bloat.

What can we do about this situation?

> At other websites, developers have very little leverage. The people pushing for bloated websites are managers / executives, not devs. Hence, bloat.

I found that AMP helps a lot in that marketing/exec teams see Google pushing AMP and think they need AMP.

My company built AMP equivalents, and honestly I wish we could ditch our entire React site for AMP.

Instead of an exec demanding a feature, we can now say "AMP doesn't support it." No matter how many times we've set performance budgets, management absolutely tears the budgets down the second we need to implement some flashy new feature (which for some reason is the perceived solution to every sales slump). A group of us has tried to use data against this at least a handful of times, but memories seem to be short lived.

Of course we need organizational change, but after pushing a stone up the hill over and over again you essentially just say "fuck it" and let it crush you. Bottom-up corporate change is a fool's errand.