There are plenty of middleware-like solutions that can add solutions automatically too. And if you fail closed, you will always notice in testing and can add tokens where they are missing.
I (one of the co-authors of the post) would also characterize our approach as "skating to where the puck will be". I'm sure that browsers will patch these bugs, the Edge one was fixed quickly. Our product only nominally supports the latest - 1 versions of Chrome and Safari. This is of course a luxury not available to all developers.
I still wouldn't recommend this as a solution though, since it's been broken repeatedly.
That taught me little. I held onto the belief hacking a target by website is only for really dumb victims.
Then I started reading Bug Bounty reports on HackerOne and BugCrowd and was terrified at people doing account takeovers with CSRF attacks on oft overlooked functionality in no name sites like Twitter or FB.
That humbled me real quick.
As an aside, FB has to put a stupid interactive prompt to not open the browser JS console unless you type a key code. In an era where people will misguidedly copy paste into that, it is real brazen to believe token stealing and other CSRF vectors are not footholds and do not really happen.
I presume I just misunderstood you, but I wanted to go on the record for those on HN secretly believing this position and call them nuts.
Also, bug bounties are not representative of real attacks.
I've written my own share of complicated exploits, but from an actual defense perspective... that's not how people are getting hacked IRL. It's all word macros and sqlmap.
As for the majority of hacks being something else I full on agree. I think phishing for credentials and malware installs, and leaked credentials in recent years, makes up the majority of intrusions. Many of those are opportunistic though and not necessarily targeted
And then, from the pool of "client-side web bugs", how many involve browser bugs?
This is just such a tail risk that it's hard to make myself care.