I find "web platform poorly designed, therefore frameworks with 100s of dependencies" a bit too easy, especially when the user experience suffers in the end. I also believe that not every complexity needs to be solved with code. Isn't it a worthwhile exercise to figure out if something can be solved with (significantly) less code?

> It has to be somewhere.

I tend to agree; I think I'm just trying to not shift it to the user device's runtime.

One method of a simpler web is, ironically, porting traditional applications to the web. I mean compiling C or C++ apps to WASM and then running them.

Typically, then you get extremely rich and complex user interfaces with less work. The problem is though that this is still janky. It's not a smooth, or even viable, experience sometimes.

But it goes to show that making applications via the Web IS unnecessarily complex. Because the tools, being HTML, JS, and CSS were never intended for applications but rather documents. Personally, I think it's a sliding-scale type thing between documents and applications. Anyway, the standards have been expanded to try to address the application use cases but it's all "bolted on" stuff. And the document stuff also has to stay because that's still a primary use case.

Like, I would rather shoot myself than try to replicate photoshop in the Web. I'd much rather use Qt for an application like that.

Minification, bundling, prefixing automation doesn’t really have to be there

Linting can be setup globally instead of per project

Bundling is a practical, basic need, for acceptable load time. HTTP/3 may help there but I haven't seen it in practice.

I thought I read that HTTP/3 only helps with high latency connections that experience a lot of packet loss.

Sorry, I mean HTTP/2 multiplexing

Not having 100s of dependencies to bundle from is great too. In the jQuery era, you had jQuery, a few plugins, and the main js files. Now we’ve pushed backend’s logic in the frontend without the pragmatism of the tooling.

Your own code is typically at least a dozen modules, bundling is required even with zero dependency