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I think it's not as much narrative as the explosion of the tech field in general.

When i started out tinkering with tech in general in the early 2000s people drawn to the internet were still mostly a smaller core of passionate forerunners many of whom subscribed to artistic values like simplicity, beauty and the idea of zen. This began to change with web 2.0 circa 2008.

Both my Mac and my Pc from 2005 are way snappier than todays OSX or Win10. Not as fast but has way less latency.

Today tech education is aimed at highly paid and fancy careers for lots of kids with little passion for engineering or designing who never learned to use a desktop because they just had an iPad - they hardly know that you can copy and paste and almost don't know what a website is outside of walled gardens, i kid you not.

This year had had the most students ever start in tech related fields, and i know from teaching shortly at university that about 95% have not gone into the field because they love to tinker but because it's highly paid or a "cool career".

I know there are still the oldschool "designers and experimenters" out there but it's all about signal to noise. Of course size, complexity, high level modularized abstraction and dependency hell is also an issue, but this probably won't get resolved as 99% of tech people today don't care and don't remember using a computer that didn't have 500ms of latency when closing a window.

I was with you until

> Both my Mac and my Pc from 2005 are way snappier than todays OSX or Win10. Not as fast but has way less latency.

The single most dramatic performance increase I have ever experienced on a computer was with the advent of the SSD.

Load times < 2009 when SSDs became mainstream were atrocious.

I'm not sure what you mean by mainstream, but SSDs were still pretty niche in 2009 and traditional hard drives have remained to be pretty popular until recently due to the lower cost.

I bought my first 128gb SSD for like 300 I think in 2008.

My first SSD was in 2008, was 64gb SLC for $1000. Still going strong. But yeah, was pretty niche.

SSD improve programs' loading time, they do nothing for the latency of the UI of those programs.

When win95 arrived and brought the desktop as we know it to the masses it brought with it some latency that has not been reduced since. Subjectively it has increased, it might just be my patiece that goes shorter, so YMMV.

Yes SSD did bring back some of the lost time, and some more, but the programs don't feel as responsive as in "the old times."

It's cargo-culting. Everyone just follows the herd. Once something gets the scarlet letter of being "old" compared to something "new" (both of which are purely perception), it's really hard to ever get back to using the "old" thing (even if it's performance is better or some other tangible benefit).

I've noticed that this incessant trendchasing is largely confined to web development, although it has spread a lot from there (Electron...)

To be blunt, I do not care how "new" something is. Newer is not always better, and change is not always good. Churn is not progress. Perhaps those should be the core values that developers need to be "indoctrinated" with, for lack of a better term.

Then again, I'm also probably much older than the average web developer by at least a decade and a half, and saw lots of silly fads come and go.

I remember back around 1999 reading about a guy who had hand-coded his own http server. It was extremely barebones, no server side processing, just fed out html pages. And it was fast, faster than anything you could pay money for. And secure; since it's functionality was so limited compared to all the other web servers, the attack surface was super small. Fast, safe, reliable.

And of course it was used to power porn sites.

> the death of high quality software engineering

I think this is the crux of it. It isn't client side or server side rendering, it's simply bad code. Both approaches can be bad if they're poorly engineered. With modern trends we see front end based rendering more prominently, and with that we see a lot of truly terrible implementations. A lot of this is the ease at which you can include a library that does some task for you, but often at the expense of bloating the payload. Good software engineering is hard. It requires effort. It requires more time. It's the antithesis of agile development; moving slowly but being robust. Most companies or side projects aren't willing to choose to build features more robustly if it means cutting the dev speed in half.

> This narrative has been going hard for the last 6~7 years. For me, it's difficult to pinpoint all the causes of this.

I always thought it came with the serverless meme. All those services used to do that cost money, so the decision was made in a lot of places to put the work on the client. New people to the industry maybe haven't connected the dots and think it's for scale when it's really for costs.

I think that’s certainly influenced this trend. Make the client side do all the hard work and server costs go down. I’m not sure how much that cost is, but I’m guessing it could be substantial.

Here's the thing.

An advanced website (or web app) is likely going to have a lot of JS on it already. Should most blogs? Probably not, unless they want interactive demonstrations of concepts, or a commenting system more advanced than what HN has. But beyond that, JS is everywhere.

So at some point, there is JS running on the browser, code that has to be architected and maintained.

So then someone proposes adding another language on the server into the mix, one that will generate HTML and deliver the JS.

The dev experience is, likely, not as good. It is more complicated in a myriad of ways, debugging is harder, and the tech stack is more complicated and more fragile.

And the thing is, good SPAs are really good. But the opposite strategy having every request round trip the server is going to suck in certain cases no matter what the developer does. Something as simple as the site being hosted far away from the user, or there being an above average amount of network latency, is enough to slow down every interaction.

Now all this said, when I'm overseas and suck on 256kbit roaming, HN is about the only site I can use.