Dear lord it even loads a service worker so it can cache the app.

That is included by default in create-react-app.

It is included but disabled by default[0].

[0]: https://create-react-app.dev/docs/making-a-progressive-web-a...

Where are you getting 1.1 MB from? I'm getting 223 KB over the wire, which includes a 100 KB image.

I cloned the repository for the site. Over-the-wire, though, I do get around 227 KB.

I don't find it ironic anymore, I find it the state of affairs in modern development environments. I'm always surprised how quickly people jump to using massive scaffolding, systems, or systems of systems to accomplish things that need about two orders of magnitude less complexity.

Then again, it seems people that develop these monstrosities are never the ones to maintain them.

You're missing out the bug picture. All my projects started small. But day after day, you need a be feature and a new thing. It will grow. At that point you need to add these tools yourself, manually.

I rather have a standard baseline to be up to speed and don't get bothered with this on each app.

> You're missing out the bug picture.

Is this a Freudian slip? The amount of bugs in "modern web apps" seems rather huge indeed.

> I rather have a standard baseline to be up to speed

To me, the baseline for any kind of website or web app is, you know, HTML. When authoring static HTML or rendering it dynamically on the server, I'm up to speed instantly.

The graybeards called that "creeping featuritis."

Don't underestimate managers who "encourage" unnecessary complexity to boost their own profile. Their direct reports have to "design" and then implement and maintain them. Then the manager gets a higher profile for managing teams that build and design "critical", complex systems.

There is a lot of blame to go around in this industry--it isn't just individual engineers acting out of ignorance or resume building.

built in job security (if not for the original dev), but for those that come after the dev0.

I mean that's smaller than the average of the top 100 modules.