you mean the same facebook which created react.js? If you think any of those companies is not betting heavily on JS, you're out of touch :)

maybe, but i dont think they grew because of JS. they grew despite it maybe ;)

maybe, but it's impossible without it

None of those sites are static html. Not even close.

html != static

Static literally == not using JavaScript to manipulate the DOM. Once you're stuck using JS for core functionality, you really want a decent programming language.

I think people are complaining about two separate things - actually-static-ish websites like newspapers, shipping 10MB, and web apps like Facebook shipping 10MB. The latter is an unavoidable outcome of shipping Serious Software; the former is mostly driven by ad networks, not development ease.

I think static could have multiple meaning, and the one the original comment meant is ambiguous. There are "static site generators" which technically generate static sites, but could still use JavaScript.

Yeah we re talking about html, not static. Plus, iirc, it is actually most SPAs that are ‘static’, i.e served as plain index.html containing all the Javascript.