Probably not. HN began using rel="nofollow noreferrer" in links.

I think it's important to highlight how the myriad of bad ideas in JS and newbies implementing them really is no fault of the newbies. It should be obvious, but I wonder whether people reading posts like these interpret them as hostile towards the newbies. It's the technically challenged pseudo-leadership out there that is to blame for most of it. The running head-first into "DX" while still consistently having some of the worst developer experience known to man as a whole and not seeing this, this is a by-product of a largely inexperienced but overvalued senior layer in the tech world that find big voices either via Twitter or more directly via pseudo-lifestyle dev channels on YouTube.

Some of them flaunt credentials that would fall apart immediately in real conversations but they are the ones that host the conversation so it can't really come up. Not all dev YouTubers are like that, of course, but I'm sure a few come to mind as people are reading this.

On top of the above I think people aren't considering that software is often a reflection of values[0] and that people disguising theirs as "best practices" does not make them more valid than others. It's perfectly fine to not prematurely pessimize your solutions and that often requires making choices that some people will see as wrong because they have different values, for example. This is not only fine as a personal value but many businesses reach a point fairly fast where an ever-growing part of their work is performance oriented, despite what a lot of people tend to think. Solutions that see no real use or have no plurals tend to reach this point much slower or never than solutions that do.

The above is also interesting to think about; a lot of people don't value reasonably fast software because they've largely never experienced it. It's not an uncommon reaction to marvel at simple solutions that have no real optimization put into them but simply aren't written completely wastefully from the beginning, because they're so much faster than what people are used to.

[0] Bryan Cantrill - Platform as a Reflection of Values: https://vimeo.com/230142234

> Once upon a time the noobs started with PHP and gave it a bad name with their insecure spaghetti code

My admittedly shallow impression of PHP was that, because of how determined it generally is to keep going despite any errors that may occur, it doesn’t really need outside help to acquire a bad name or amass insecure code.

Now, on one hand, this is an opinion of someone who tried doing PHP for at most a couple of months nearly a decade ago (ugh), so it’s of very limited value. On the other hand, the reason I stopped trying was exactly the above: I found that writing it made me incredibly nervous and that I just couldn’t make peace with the fact that I won’t be able to make my code fail on all reasonable but unforeseen errors. Never before or after have I encountered a language that so actively fought me when I wanted to crash my program (and I’m perfectly comfortable writing C and Forth on microcontrollers). I could’ve been using it wrong, but one way or another that awful impression still lingers.