People misuse and abuse JS all the dang time. Take Twitter: you follow a link to a tweet from somewhere else, but first thing you see as the page loads is not the tweet — it's everything but the tweet itself. There's a spinner instead of it, because rendering it server-side would've made too much sense, I guess. Gotta make an API request from the client and render it client-side just because that's so trendy.
In other words, there are too many websites that are made as "web apps" that should not be web apps.
Which is made way worse by the fact that tweets are 280 characters of text. It's absurd that Twitter has a higher delay than a few round trips when they aren't reloading any structural content. Wtf are these people on 300k salaries doing all day?
His point is it's just 280 characters of text to download to the client to show the tweet. The client have downloaded probably 1,000x that much text before he can even see what he wants to see.
Ah - but here you're hitting a wall. You could build a very lean twitter with minimal advertising and a more sane tweet presentation order - but nobody on the business side of things actually wants you to build that. They want you to build a social media platform that can be leveraged with synergies and RoI to maximize user retention and hopefully get a bit of Ad money out of the process somewhere along the way.
It is. And I think this is because customers aren't valued they're commoditized, now personal information is a commodity with a fair bit of value and society has failed to properly punish the misuse of that value so it's sort of an ever lasting font of money.
I wholeheartedly believe that when we solve the issue of undervaluing personal information... that's when Ads become nearly worthless (like they are in print media) and software salaries deflate to the point where those useful by humans tools become the primary product again - instead of tools to use harvesting from humans.
But, I'm quite an optimist - and a cynical one at that.
This is entirely speculations but I think that may come from a very interesting factor - it's not what the engineering team views as a core competency. There may be a big divide in how the business is perceived between marketing and devs and optimizing Ads (this throw away side-component) isn't viewed as a tech priority by the team.
A more reasonable reason might just be that trying to be a platform of everything is a complex proposition and they've accepted so much complexity that all their labour at this point is being poured into maintaining that complexity rather than making improvements.
In other words, there are too many websites that are made as "web apps" that should not be web apps.