There is zero benefit to me in loading 20mb of garbage just so I can read 10kb of text.
JS is not the issue and reddit could have easily made a snappy react version of the site. Monetization, ad tech and engagement growth are the issues.
I could also build a CNN clone in pure React (no SSG or SSR) without the ads and the millions of autoplaying videos that would demolish its current performance.
As for Reddit, perhaps SSR would be a better fit indeed. But most of its problems come from the fact that the SPA implementation is dogshit, and not from the architecture itself... Some things plainly don’t work, for example a feature as basic as the comment tree is broken as hell. This mess would be equally possible with SSR though - I would personally screw up more easily a comment tree implementation with AJAX data fetching in SSR templating and vanilla JS than in React.
I agree that many sites, especially news sites, are disgusting bloated messes. And yes, JavaScript is often involved but it’s not the cause - it is merely an accessory to the fact. The causes are ads, tracking, data mining, even crypto mining (!), and piss-poor implementations (and no, JS frameworks are not conducive to the latter any more than vanilla JS). Each of these causes is in turn motivated by its own root cause, most often economic in nature.
2) Sometimes things might be useful to people other than you. The world doesn't exist to cater to your needs, and referring to things that aren't exactly what you want as cancerous is childish.
Aside from the marketing monkeys that put it all there in the first place?
Also, what’s with calling people monkeys? I’m sure many coders here produce stuff that is as questionable in value as what ad executives do.
People need to put food on the table and it’s abhorrent to think of yourself better than an another person because you build data pipelines in Scala that the universe doesn’t give a shit about.