[toastal]

The web was nicer when you could inspect, learn, & riff off of what others where doing in the industry–like the old music industry used to do when covering & borrowing a phrase was considered homage not grounds for lawsuit. It’s now all meant to be closed off & behind build tools that complect the output where most folks don’t even know how their pipeline works; and this is strange since the simple tools of HTML, CSS, & JS simply construct the web without any build steps at all if you wanted.

[xp84]

Agree completely. As a minor nicety, though, I’ve noticed most sites publish sourcemaps in production now. So, in a few ways it’s become more possible to inspect and study JS, compared to when sourcemaps weren’t there, and you could only see mangled source.

[zelphirkalt]

I am not so sure about sourcemaps being an adequate replacement. They are just one feature flag toggle away from disappearing at any given moment. All it takes is one over-zealous tech decision maker to make them disappear on a website. And I know the types that would rather turn it off to shave off a few kB from the delivery, instead of rethinking their choice of framework. Or someone suddenly thinking, that they need to "protect" (obfuscate) their frontend source code. Source maps are too easy to switch off.