[codyb]

It's pretty crazy. I have just about the exact same experience I'd say. On personal projects I'm moving back towards straight CSS, Vanilla JS (maybe I'll use jQuery if they get more complicated, they're very bare bones at the moment), and server generated HTML with Django templates.

Web Development seems to move at this incredible pace. I also started just about 8 years ago and I've gone through jQuery, Angular 1, Backbone, React, React with Classes, React with Hooks.

And even the tiniest project I do with NPM ends up being hundreds of megs on disk locally. I was cleaning my harddrive recently, MomentJS is _over 100mbs_ cloned from GitHub, I don't even know if I actually did an NPM install in there.

Material UI was _nearly a gig_. I'm assuming there are assets in there somewhere.

Meanwhile we have really neat improvements in CSS and HTML that I want to go and use but I'm to busy learning how to do CSS in my JavaScript, and validation in my JavaScript. Reinventing accessibility by deploying ever more bloated projects filled with bugs and inconsistencies.

I wonder if we'll see a gradual return to less complicated stacks as people realize a lot of work can be accomplished pretty reasonably with a lot less and a greater reliance on the browsers to do a fair amount of water carrying.

I'm not sure... but I have to get back to learning how to create APIs in GraphQL ;-).

[pkphilip]

Just to give this some perspective, the entire Wordperfect 5.2 download is less than 4MB!

https://winworldpc.com/product/wordperfect/5x-dos

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24413394

Web development has become so cludgy especially with the SPAs which do not even support bookmarking.

[raihansaputra]

Well SPA can do route rewrites if it's taken care of properly (Vue Router makes this easy). I'm always pushing for it on my projects for usability and link sharing. There's no reason to not have it.

[ratww]

There's nothing wrong with Vanilla JS and jQuery, but if you need more interactivity, it's possible to use modern libraries like React (with htm [1]) or Vue without a compilation step, all with zero dependencies. The size of the libraries is only 10k to 20k bigger than jQuery.

If you need even less bytes, then Preact is also an option (also with htm [1]), and it clocks at around 3k + 400 bytes for htm.

If you're only targeting modern browsers with ES6 support you can even use `import from` statements.

[1] https://github.com/developit/htm

[stopyellingatme]

Have you looked at Svelte? I've started using it and its a breath of fresh air. It feels like going back to the basics.

https://svelte.dev/

[codyb]

I want to check out Svelte, thanks for the reminder!