Hey Justin!

I am with you 100%. When I wrote my Master’s thesis on bioinformatics, I used Ruby for as much as I could and switched to C++ when performance was too slow. The Ruby code was much faster to develop and easier to read.

There is an argument that can be made that JavaScript on the web is exploding, growing exponentially faster than increases in bandwidth or processing power. (Mobile phones and laptops prioritize battery life over processor speed, so 2020 CPU technology is not much faster than 2015 CPU technology; it just has lower power usage.) But that’s because of frameworks, unnecessary polyfills, and the like — not because we are forgetting microperformance optimizations. I personally always favor code readability over performance, until performance becomes a huge issue. (Like why should I make a vanilla JavaScript app when I can make a React app that will be easier to maintain?)

The reality of the situation is that blocking JavaScript on pages (especially ads) are the real culprit of the web slowing down, not the use of React or any other framework to build an app.