[mwcampbell]

Aggressive virtualization, especially if it also involves removing stuff that scrolled out of view, also bogs down some screen readers (particularly Windows ones) that have their own representation of the web page.

Speaking of both Discourse and screen readers, before my stint at Microsoft, I wrote a Windows screen reader, which tried to detect client-side page navigation by watching for the URL (minus the fragment) to change. Discourse's infinite scrolling implementation broke this heuristic, because Discourse would use the history API to update the URL as the user scrolled. Not sure if I or they were in the wrong there.

Interesting that you feel that Discourse penalizes you for being far away from the origin server. When Discourse was new, one of the founders blogged about how their heavy use of client-side JavaScript made the application better for users far away from the origin server:

https://eviltrout.com/2013/01/06/turbolinks-and-the-prague-e...

Maybe the author had a point, but it sounds like Discourse still relies too much on frequent round trips.

Edit to add:

> a precise-DOM-updates framework that cares significantly about runtime performance

That's Overture, right? I wonder how it compares to Svelte and Solid.