I do remember stuff built in Frontpage breaking terribly if you resized your browser. I remember Joomla outputting reams of html that the browser would choke on the nodes. I remember doing chat apps via iframes and long polling. It was all there.
Better technology has only lead to better outcomes on both the low and the high end, and it’s a lot easier to debug and fix the low quality outcomes.
The author said frameworks == bloat. But the above suggests frameworks != bloat. So I don't know what point you're still trying to make.
> A lot of people are designing their products to show off to their peers
Again, I'm not sure how using new frameworks is "showing off for your peers".
> or for google (SEO)
Client-side rendering only makes SEO harder. Again, I'm not sure what argument you're trying to make.
Present clear reasoning and evidence instead of vague, preconceived assumptions.
You'll find a lot of tiny companies with dev. blogs where they explain in-depth the scaling strategy of their unknown, sporadically-used product.
Yes, react and vue are a few hundred kb gzipped. But are we seriously going to pretend that projects built with react are in a few hundred kb range? You can't even predict how big a project will be. It's not react's or vue's fault, it's simply how it is - add assets, add css, add additional libraries for <insert reason here> and it's not unrealistic to get 2-3 MB that you need to download.
A lot of people are designing their products to show off to their peers or for google (SEO). Users get left out. And we (users) are starting to feel it. Heed the warning or turn the blind eye.