[samwillis]

Latency absolutely does accumulate for code as the parent described that cannot make a request until the previous one has returned (images linked from css files for example, or a spa with poorly chunked code). There is a lot of that code out there. "Modern" tooling and practices reduce that, but it not a solved problem for the majority of legacy code.

[TekMol]

You describe the issue of dependencies.

You don't need modern tooling to prevent it. A server side build step to combine assets only makes things worse. Because on first load you get bombed with a giant blob of code you don't need. Or the developers get lost in the complexity of it and it becomes a giant hairball of chaos. The Twitter homepage takes 185 requests to load. AirBnB 240. Reddit 247. Look at the source code to see the chaos their build systems create.

Simply using a server side rendred html page and native javascript modules prevents all of that. The modules get loaded asynchronously. So the modules and their dependencies have time to load until all the html interface and the asynchronous assets like CSS, images etc are loaded and rendered. And then the modules can kick in.

[drewmol]

Interesting for me: reddit.com made 136 requests, 2.3MB Transferred, 3.0MB resources loaded by page ireddit.com 254 requests, 19.2 MB!! transferred 22.3 MB resources

old.reddit.com was 10 requests, 5kB transferred, 9kB resources I tried mbasic.facebook.com and interestingly it was (not logged in) only 1 request 1.1kB transferred, 1.1kB resources

I turned off any browser level blocking, but I do have some network level ad-blocking. I wonder why you get 111 more requests for (www.)reddit.com than I do.

Those(mbasic.facebook, old.reddit) are the old/basic interfaces I use regularly and both are requirements for me, I won't use their normal websites or apps so if they get shutdown I would leave for good.

[samwillis]

All quite true, server renders pages are the quickest route to first render, in-line your CSS for that first page and it's even quicker. All best practices for sites that fit those categories, content and e-commerce for example.

But not all sites and apps can do that, and almost certainly not for all functionality and pages. Bloat isn't just about tooling, it's organisational too. Lots of teams all working within one product.

Modern ES modules can actually be worse if not bundled on on the server or by a build system. The browser doesn't know what to request until it starts parsing the previous response, that dependency tree can be large. That literally is accumulating latency. However with progressive improvement it's not much of an issue, but again not everyone can do that.

On top of that anyone still on HTTP 1.2 will only be doing ~5 requests to the same domain in parallel.

Point is, latency does accumulate, but it doesn't have to with well designed code structure, "modern" (rediscovered 90s) techniques, and modern browser features like preload and preconnect.

[eerikkivistik]

I for one agree with both of you.