After reading my ceremonial 1000th testimony about how HN user prefers sites with less CSS I'm about done with it though. We get it! Engineers are proud of how little they care for white space and colors! Can we talk about something else in the top comments of any page about website design?
That's not what people here are saying, though. Indeed, even your parent comment said how he misses a small HTML pages with CSS. Most engineers would be totally fine with HTML and a modest payload of nice, modern CSS styling, a perhaps a small bit of non-required progressively enhancing JS.
Our problem is with huge JS frameworks used in sites that aren't actual web applications (e.g., Gmail), but rather web sites (like news sites). And I say this as someone who has primarily made my living the past 5 years as a "frontend engineer" (ie, JS programmer). JS frameworks can be wonderful for actual web applications, but they're way overkill for documents online for reading (and also make the experience worse for the reader).
Oh, and we also hate of dozens/hundreds of kb of unneeded font downloads.
Also, for the record, I'm a big fan of (appropriate use of) white space and color. I definitely come down heavily on the side of bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com (vs motherfuckingwebsite.com).
I wish there were some way to avoid being subject to resume driven development when I'm on the internet. Alas, it's not to be, because instead of taking a step back and asking "do we need this" we get webdevs asking "how can I force fit the latest shiny bauble into my professional CV." And we end up with react graphQL node AWS kubernetes docker rube goldberg machines pumping tens of millions of bytes of data and billions of bytes of markup and JavaScript through Kafka all to serve up news text.
Everybody's job looks easy when you don't have the full list of requirements and a deadline in front of you. What looks like resume-padding may in fact be the best way to fulfill a requirement you didn't know they had.