Hacker News Reader

There's something to this. I recently shipped a music curation site and deliberately avoided React/Next/etc - just HTML, CSS, vanilla JS. The cognitive load difference is stark. The 'peak' might be less about capability and more about us rediscovering that simpler tools often suffice.

View on HN

Same. I build stuff for local businesses in my area with nothing but boring old HTML, PHP, CSS and JS. I guess my shit isn't "web scale" but it works, and it works consistently, with minimal downtime, and it worked during both Amazon and Cloudflare's latest outages.

I don't need my software to eat the world, I'm perfectly content with it just solving someone's problems.

It's all about picking the right tools for the job. The "cognitive load" might be larger in a vanilla project compared to React when your interface is more complex and interactive.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com