I'd be interested, in what constitutes a performance sensitive web application... is it a full fledged 3D game renderung thousands of time strings per second? Or .... ?
In this case the article seems to be concerned about library size. 72kb vs 3kb is a real difference.
Loading and parsing all those KB of JS for a mobile website is almost a non-starter for publishers, who are now under the gun to shed as much page weight as possible to have a hope at SEO traffic going forward. Also, for people using outer reaches of the mobile web, it can cost up to $50 / GB USD - it seems cruel to cost them $0.05 to use a convenience function. For me, I was working on a serverless node.js function that needed to be able to minimize startup and execution time to control costs. It took a bit of extra work to use js Date, but using Moment literally doubled my cost to run the function.
Is this sarcasm? I wish publishers gave a damn about page weight. I’m sure some big names do, but most don’t, and it’s easy to see if you open any monetized website at all.
Page speed has long been a search ranking factor, but as Google News is now allowing non-AMP pages in the News Carousel with the requirement that they pass all 3 Core Web Vitals checks. This has forced a lot of search-dependant, ad-driven publishers to reevaluate their priorities and get better at page speed and UX. I led an effort to do so at an enterprise publisher, so I'm looking at it from that lens where we dropped lots of 3rd party libraries, services, and underperforming ads. You're right that many sites simply don't care. Google delayed their full rollout of what was expected to be a requirement in June 2021. When it is fully in effect, you probably won't be seeing super ad heavy sites ranking in mobile search as much. Sites that live off of social traffic may continue not to care.
lots of enterprise apps. You can end up with date calculations that don't actually take that long, but just enough to make users on slow systems go 'its broke i can't do my job, it's ITs fault'.
These days facebook.com could be considered as one.