[brazzy]

> For example, HN users love the fact that it’s fast and responsive.

It can be that because it is downright ascetic.

It's easy to be fast and responsive and at the same time eschew all the fancy toolchainy stuff when you have very few features.

[jhardy54]

Counter-point: I've built a P2P social media application that doesn't use any client-side JS. There are challenges, mostly around composing rich text (how is <textarea/> the best we have?!) but it's entirely possible to ship features without front-end JS.