JavaScript Broke the Web (and Called it Progress)

The tragedy is, none of this is necessary. Once upon a time, we had a fast, stable, resilient web. But we replaced it with a JavaScript cargo cult.

Now it takes four engineers, three frameworks, and a CI/CD pipeline just to change a heading. It’s inordinately complex to simply publish a webpage.

This isn’t evolution. It’s self-inflicted complexity. And we’ve normalised it – because somewhere along the way, we started building websites for developers, not for users.

At the same time, JavaScript stopped being just a front-end language. With the rise of Node.js, JS moved server-side, and with it came a wave of app developers entering the web ecosystem. These weren’t web designers or content publishers. They were engineers, trained to build applications, not documents. And they brought with them an architecture-first mindset: patterns, state management, dependency injection, abstracted logic. The result? A slow cultural shift from building pages to engineering systems – even when all the user needed was to load an article.

We’re burning user attention, developer time, and business resources to simulate interactivity that nobody asked for.

JavaScript should be the icing. Not the cake. And certainly not the oven, the recipe, and the kitchen sink.