Writing Javascript without a build system

The Incredible Overcomplexity of the Shadcn Radio Button

Well, this is horrifying.

CSS-in-JS: The Great Betrayal of Frontend Sanity - The New Stack

This is a spot-on analysis of how CSS-in-JS failed to deliver on any of its promises:

CSS-in-JS was born out of good intentions — modularity, predictability and componentization. But what we got was complexity disguised as progress.

Escape Velocity: Break Free from Framework Gravity — Den Odell

React is no longer just a library. It’s a full ecosystem that defines how frontend developers are allowed to think.

Real talk!

Browsers now ship View Transitions, Container Queries, and smarter scheduling primitives. The platform keeps evolving at a fair pace, but most teams won’t touch these capabilities until React officially wraps them in a hook or they show up in Next.js docs.

Innovation keeps happening right across the ecosystem, but for many it only becomes “real” once React validates the approach. Which is fine, assuming you enjoy waiting for permission to use the platform you’re already building on.

Zing!

The critique isn’t that React is bad, but that treating any single framework as infrastructure creates blind spots in how we think and build. When React becomes the lens through which we see the web, we stop noticing what the platform itself can already do, and we stop reaching for native solutions because we’re waiting for the framework-approved version to show up first.

If your team’s evolution depends on a single framework’s roadmap, you are not steering your product; you are waiting for permission to move.

It’s time for modern CSS to kill the SPA - Jono Alderson

SPAs were a clever solution to a temporary limitation. But that limitation no longer exists.

Use modern server rendering. Use actual pages. Animate with CSS. Preload with intent. Ship less JavaScript.

JavaScript broke the web (and called it progress) - Jono Alderson

Semantic HTML? Optional. Server-side rendering? Rebuilt from scratch. Accessibility? Maybe, if there’s time. Performance? Who cares, when you can save costs by putting loading burdens onto the user’s device, instead of your server?

So gradually, the web became something you had to compile before you could publish. Not because users needed it. But because developers wanted it to feel modern.

Everything’s optimised for developers – and hostile to everyone else.

This isn’t accidental. It’s cultural. We’ve created an industry where complexity is celebrated. Where cleverness is rewarded. Where engineering sophistication is valued more than clarity, usability, or commercial effectiveness.