Look, I’ve replaced plenty of jQuery with vanilla JS. I’m totally on board for lighter, leaner pages. My point was simply that there’s this tedious cycle where people crap on the older tools and say everything is better across the board with the current hotness without actually measuring anything. There are a lot of cool capabilities we can use now but they’re only going to be better at the things you actually measure & attempt to improve.

If you don’t profile your app, that cool new stack is probably going to be bigger and slower because tools like webpack make it easy to manage tons of code and you won’t notice until you test it on mobile, slow WiFi, etc.