[corndoge]

To your point on NPM dependencies, CDNs for JS libraries is another thing that I recently learned is common practice, which I don't fully understand. It seems like if the CDN goes down then your application stops working, but I am convinced I'm missing something here because it seems like such poor engineering judgement. This seems to be really common in SPAs, which is precisely where (it seems to me) you shouldn't be using a CDN.

It seems the convenience of cloud based deployment pipelines is not really worth situations like this.

[jfkebwjsbx]

People do it because it is faster (limit of requests per domain) and cheaper.

[thanksforfish]

Specifically for the javascript frameworks, the use of a popular CDN increases the chance that the browser will have the asset in the cache already. Browser cache is a huge win for load times.

Static file hosting via a managed CDN is a fairly reliable option, better than many companies can build on their own.