The great JavaScript lie

Every now and then, and article comes along that I wish I had written myself. Today, that article is The Great Gaslighting of the JavaScript Era by Jared White.

In it, Jared explores the numerous things we’ve been told, repeatedly by “very smart people” at big, important tech companies, about how great the JS frameworks are and how much time and work they save us and how much better they are than just rendering some HTML with PHP or Ruby or something.

The entire thing is quote worthy, but this little bit in particular really stands out…

I’m angry because for the past decade of web development, I and so many others like me feel like we’ve been repeatedly gaslit, and that so many of the “merchants of complexity” refuse to acknowledge the harm that’s been done.

The age of frontend JavaScript frameworks eating the web world—SPAs (Single-Page Applications) and all that—didn’t happen simply because some well-meaning developers found great DX and went along with it whole-heartedly (yay for the developers! amirite?).

It happened because we were fed a line.

We were told writing apps with an HTML-first, SSR-first, progressively enhanced mindset, using our preferred language/tech stack of choice, was outdated and bad for users.

That was a lie.

We were told writing apps completely using frontend-y JavaScript would make our lives easier.

That also was a lie.

If you have about 20 minutes to spare today, set it aside to go read the whole thing. It’s fantastic.