In my opinion, it's a question of what you want to optimize for, speed of execution/accessibility/responsiveness or speed of software development.
The modern web is a stack of abstractions that separates the code in what the site is written in from the underlying machine that renders it. This stack of abstractions makes it many orders of magnitude slower than it theoretically could be to render, but makes it many orders of magnitude easier to program. In other words, this seems like the age old debate of "interpreted vs. compiled" [0].
While the front end ecosystem is sprawling and modern web pages are slow and clunky, the barrier to entry, for most people, is at an all time low. It's easier now to create a web page that works consistently for the vast majority web browsers with minimum effort. The render speed and accessibility might suffer, but this is always the price of abstraction.
Jonathan Blow has a talk specifically lamenting this point [0].
The modern web is a stack of abstractions that separates the code in what the site is written in from the underlying machine that renders it. This stack of abstractions makes it many orders of magnitude slower than it theoretically could be to render, but makes it many orders of magnitude easier to program. In other words, this seems like the age old debate of "interpreted vs. compiled" [0].
While the front end ecosystem is sprawling and modern web pages are slow and clunky, the barrier to entry, for most people, is at an all time low. It's easier now to create a web page that works consistently for the vast majority web browsers with minimum effort. The render speed and accessibility might suffer, but this is always the price of abstraction.
Jonathan Blow has a talk specifically lamenting this point [0].
[0] http://blog.gmarceau.qc.ca/2009/05/speed-size-and-dependabil...
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJ4GcZs7y6g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FvBySbGueww https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URSOH4F3vbU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MlIZ2Q3Rvc8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jpk9Q5gCyIY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xK6YZ3NFjuE