Is this because it is a SPA? I'm hesitant to ascribe blame but I have to confess I'm pretty bored of inexplicably heavy frontend code that takes an age to both arrive and execute. Bonkers stuff.
Yep, it is a SPA - but there is still a category of old grumpy devs who insist that the real web is a single hand crafted HTML file sprinkled with a bit of CSS.
Yes, a 6MB (compressed) bundle is big. But it is not clear that the alternatives are better. The bundle would need to be split increasing complexity of building the application.
It is likely judged that splitting the bundle only has minimal positives compared to the negatives - which also align with my experiecne developing software for roughly the same target segment.
I assure you that 20 years ago websites with chats existed and they worked fine. Which means they weren't so huge because it would have taken days to download that amount of stuff.
Just like 40 years ago we where able to store a POSIX compatible OS on a floppy drive.
The things developers usually forget is that there are other stakeholders than the computer executing code - IMHO a lot of developers would benefit from developing a bit of business acumen.
There is no inexplicably heavy front end code and SPA is not to blame here. This is a matter of non existent optimization and code pilled on top of code.
Yes, a 6MB (compressed) bundle is big. But it is not clear that the alternatives are better. The bundle would need to be split increasing complexity of building the application.
It is likely judged that splitting the bundle only has minimal positives compared to the negatives - which also align with my experiecne developing software for roughly the same target segment.