[can3p]

I think build systems are a very big reason for the mess javascript is in nowadays.

- Typescript is very light from the code transformation point of view. If anyone remembers the output of babel especially for async/await + the way module imports are implemented generates a really hard to read code and the "best practices" about hiding the state make things a lot harder. Just think about the fact that back in the days (tm) it was common to inspect the state of the app and change it full lisp style and now the js console can mostly be used for quick code tests and looking around when execution is stopped at breakpoint and you can't see that much anyway because of how the code is generated. - The whole babel thing still feels like a madness to me. Yeah, you're getting some new language features but for the price of non obvious code transformation that makes you need source maps (and you need to make them work and maintain that) and all the rest - Build step + npm results in on controlled bloat of the js bundle. `npm install <random-component>` may inflate you bundle by 500kb easily - And with all that there is still a quite big trouble with requiring necessary modules for the use on frontend. Just think that there is still no simple way to require all css provided by a library from npm

Another big problem on my opinion is the propagation of "write once/use everywhere" approach. It works sometimes yeah, but you need to sell your soul for that: you'll have to use something like next.js and that implies that you're bound to use node.js and then you either do all your development in node or have another service doing stuff in the language of your choice and then have a node service as a templating layer and then you need containers and orchestration and so on which makes it a technically challenging project for something that almost for sure can be done in some trivial set of technologies if this requirement had been dropped.

One could argue that we need a different approach with libraries that acknowledges that frontend is distinct world and aims to provide ready made components specifically for the web with an easy setup and no/minimal dependencies. Maybe even with a vendor folder like approach, since the won't be too much code anyway. That should be enough for 99.999% of projects and the rest can use the full scale approach and embrace complexity if they really need it.