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You should look from the perspective of developers who are not web developers. It's an insane fucking mess out there. SPAs (especially structured ones like angular) can give a developer a shot at creating a structurally sound interactive webpage without wanting to kill themselves.

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1. Angular, React, Webpack, all these stuff add to the mess. They don't take away from it. A well organized framework can still provide a good developer experience.

2. The user experience really, really suffers from this toolchain.

There's definitely an argument to be made about the second point. However many people accessing the SPAs have a fast enough internet connection that it's actually a better experience to download it all in one go. Also, "tens of megabytes" is a VAST exaggeration.

I'm looking at the application I'm responsible for. Downloads 3M Gzipped JS assets and takes > 250M "on initial load" and I feel sick to my stomach.

What does your build script look like?

Pretty normal webpack config. We recently changed from babel to esbuild and are very happy btw.

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