You joke, but I think this is actually true. If companies gave their developers of client-facing software slower computers the resulting software would end up being faster.

Yep because they would not get anything done ;)

In my experience as a web dev, all the performance goes out the window as soon as the tracking scripts are added.

I had nearly a perfect Lighthouse score until the marketing team added GTM

I don't think it's the developers who are the problem. In my experience, they're usually the ones advocating to spend time improving performance.

PMs and executives are the ones you should give slow machines to if you want more focus on performance.

Agreed, IME it's nearly always the devs arguing to improve performance.

But it would take them an order of magnitude longer to ship it. `npm install` even on a fast machine is a slog.

> `npm install` even on a fast machine is a slog

It may not be with fewer and less heavy dependencies!

It's not the end product itself that eats huge amounts of RAM or CPU. It's the dev tooling.

We must be using very different websites.

Obviously a lot of the modern web is crazy and many sites are pretty heavy on resource usage.

It's still not comparable with your average developer tooling in terms of footprint, was my point.

And why some of my past upgrades were driven by the web browser over-taxing the machine on certain sites, while nearly everything else was perfectly performant with absolutely no complaints.

haha so true