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It's remarkable how much js gets loaded onto a page (mainly due to libraries) vs. how much of its functions are needed for what the web developer is trying to do. There just is not a whole lot of use cases for the big libraries unless you're doing something really intensive like a drawing app.

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Even for the example of a drawing app, there is no need for huge libraries. The basic code of putting up a canvas and enabling some drawing on it is pretty small. Most of the apps I've seen with lots of Javascript are still doing it for extras in the UI, not the drawing itself. But many developers would rather grab an existing library than think out the simplest, smallest code that does the job.

Tree shaking should help... eventually.

Next year, in Jerusalem

You can have tree-shaking right now, with rollup.js. You can also have purely transpiled isomorphic component library (no runtime download) running at near vanillajs speeds with svelte.js.

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