This file is just in consonance with this website's style: concise, terse, to-the-point and with minimal bs.
Of all of my currently in-rotation news websites, this loads and reacts the fastest, no matter where I am or how crippled my current connection is. I am sure they are factoring load times and speed over 'shiny new features'.
Keep going, YC!
If you load megabytes of JS to do animations, as opposed to using CSS, then yes you are just doing it wrong.
Things aren't either exactly right and done one way, or else terrible. You can of course have bells and whistles like animations if your usecase requires them (HN doesn't!) and still have a fast loading site with clean code, if you do it right.
The disease is overutilizing buckloads of js scaffolding which is blatant in the majority of the websites right now. Even a small blog now "has to have" the latest xzibit framework which pulls 32 foobar dependencies, all gulped into one huge blob of minified compressed clusterfuck-pack.
Though I agree about what you're saying for blogs and other content sites, where the tradeoff is clearly inappropriate in a lot of cases. With that said, things like https://www.gatsbyjs.org/ offer an interesting '3rd way' here, allowing you to keep the productive toolchain and framework stuff but still serve a blazing fast static content site.