And then I remembered that I wasn't the actual user of these sites; no, I was the one being used. The reason all of this JavaScript is necessary is to load tracking pixels, analytics agents, and advertising networks onto the page to generate revenue and data ("the new oil!") for the site's operators.
Don't get me started on web developers' penchant for pursuing whatever front-end framework is in fashion these days. I get it, I've written my own monstrosities in highly tortured, purely functional TypeScript with fp-ts with ADTs and monads and Tasks; sometimes it's too difficult to resist from scratching that intellectual itch. But after a few years of bouncing from prototypeJS to jQuery to backbone to angular to react to vue to svelte - goddamn, does it ever end? Is anything really gained from this never-ending, ever-accelerating treadmill of newer and newer frameworks which seem to pop up faster than they can be replaced in extant codebases?
All of this at the expense of the end-used, er, end-user.
Having spent a little while exploring the metamath site [0] and its associated program, I am stunned at how snappy, simple, and _long-lasting_ the whole thing is. There are theorems here dating from fucking _1994,_ and the site is still being actively updated. There is no framework, only one binary that generates static HTML documents, which are then served to your browser, no need for client-side rendering or XHR or advertising or cookie popups, or hell, even JavaScript entirely.
But I am just shaking fists at a sky that will never fall, thanks to the shoulders of the distributed Atlas of hordes of developers keeping this digital house of cards standing.