> But really, is the amount of space, bandwidth and clock cycles we carelessly waste really justified by the gain in productivity and achievable complexity?
Yes. Space, bandwidth, CPU cycles are cheap, especially for this sort of application. Developers are expensive.
Sure, that is the standard response, but multiply the waste by the number of users, the costs that you externalize by making them pay for faster hardware and more storage and bandwidth.
Is it though? You're probably running on something with plenty of spare clock cycles and extra RAM. It's not like end users are suddenly paying a real cost for extra ram usage when the next electron app comes along.
A couple hundred megabytes on a terabyte or larger harddrive? Who cares.
But why do I have those? My notebook could cost $10 if 640 kiB of RAM and 1 GB of storage were enough. I am of course not expecting that everything should work on a system from 30 years ago, we really made use of more powerful systems to do things that were impossible before, but I think we could still do a lot better.
Sure, as a smaller company, this makes sense. And if they stay small, and want to minimize cost, fine. If they target tech-people, again, fine. But in my view, mass adoption really requires better UX/perf.
Yes. Space, bandwidth, CPU cycles are cheap, especially for this sort of application. Developers are expensive.