[untog]

The common thread in a lot of this is disregard for end user experience. But I think the biggest reason that these discussions never go anywhere is that people are using the same tools for wildly different purposes.

At a guess, I'd say that a webapp for a financial services company is going to be loaded once then interacted with heavily? Single Page App model. In that instance the time taken to download, parse and execute JS upfront isn't a big deal. Same as Gmail: when it loads, it takes a couple of seconds, then I leave the tab active for who knows how long. Plus in this situation the audience is relatively monolithic: a lot of desktops, and most of them fast.

The problem is people taking lessons learned in that environment and applying them elsewhere. Shopping sites, news sites, essentially anything that people arrive to from a Google search pay a much bigger price for a giant payload. Users can and will leave your site if it's taking too long to load. They'll be running on all kinds of devices, including low-end Androids with very underpowered CPUs.

Whenever I see a site like that implementing a full React page with Redux and who knows what else bolted on, I cringe. It's not an appropriate use of tools. But these days people only look at developer productivity (we can add so many more features so much faster!) rather than focusing on the experience in the user's hand.