I think the reason why blog posts are written in this hyperbolic format is because it catches people’s attention, or “click bait”, if you will. If it were toned down in the way you suggested (which I agree with in principle), it might lose more readers before they get to the substance. Just hypothesizing here btw.

Yes news sites are the worst of the bunch but then we get people complaining about full web apps using JS when there is no real alternative.

The problem is that sites that really had no business being "web apps" have turned into these monstrosities. The new Reddit and Youtube are great examples of this. The old versions worked just fine, but for some reason they were replaced with all Javascript versions that perform much worse.

It seems pretty clear what the motives for reddit are. They want as much tracking/ads as possible as well as actively discouraging use over the app. At every step the website tells you to use the app instead or that this content is only available for app users.

JS is not the issue and reddit could have easily made a snappy react version of the site. Monetization, ad tech and engagement growth are the issues.

Exactly. I build enterprise web apps for a living and don’t have any of these problems because I don’t have to put ads in them. They are blazing fast and users love the UX through and through. There are myriad reasons why I would never build them with traditional SSR templating.

I could also build a CNN clone in pure React (no SSG or SSR) without the ads and the millions of autoplaying videos that would demolish its current performance.

As for Reddit, perhaps SSR would be a better fit indeed. But most of its problems come from the fact that the SPA implementation is dogshit, and not from the architecture itself... Some things plainly don’t work, for example a feature as basic as the comment tree is broken as hell. This mess would be equally possible with SSR though - I would personally screw up more easily a comment tree implementation with AJAX data fetching in SSR templating and vanilla JS than in React.

I agree that many sites, especially news sites, are disgusting bloated messes. And yes, JavaScript is often involved but it’s not the cause - it is merely an accessory to the fact. The causes are ads, tracking, data mining, even crypto mining (!), and piss-poor implementations (and no, JS frameworks are not conducive to the latter any more than vanilla JS). Each of these causes is in turn motivated by its own root cause, most often economic in nature.

I mean, I agree full web apps are annoying to some extend, but if you’re loading a whole application in a few MB that actually seems kind of reasonable.

That’s just it — no benefit to you, but a lot of benefit to them. They need analytics to sustain their business. They need ads to sustain their business. They (maybe) need fancy interactions to differentiate and thereby sustain their business. If you expect everyone else to only do things that benefit you instead of mediating between benefiting you and benefiting themselves, you’re gonna be pretty disappointed.

1) Many websites are not news sites. In fact, I'd guess the vast majority. So this point doesn't feel relevant.

2) Sometimes things might be useful to people other than you. The world doesn't exist to cater to your needs, and referring to things that aren't exactly what you want as cancerous is childish.

In response to your second point, please tell me who benefits from the 20mb of cruft loaded when accessing the page?

Aside from the marketing monkeys that put it all there in the first place?

The reader who gets to read the page for free in exchange for that marketing cruft being there.

Per definition the reader gets less value than the marketing monkeys.

Because you should be comparing the aggregate of all readers versus the content publisher.

Also, what’s with calling people monkeys? I’m sure many coders here produce stuff that is as questionable in value as what ad executives do.

People need to put food on the table and it’s abhorrent to think of yourself better than an another person because you build data pipelines in Scala that the universe doesn’t give a shit about.

Both sides of a transaction value the thing they get more than the thing they give.

And the writers and editors and other staff members whose salaries are paid by that stuff.

And of those 10kb one line is the actual content and the rest is ELI5. In their defense can say that news websites are predominantly compatible with noscript.