Reading that entire thing was a struggle. Really feels like _everyone_ is wrong here. Yes the current state of FE development is overly dogmatic and cultish. But it always has been. On the other hand the frameworks and build systems are solving actual problems, they're not there for looks.

5-7 second skeleton loaders are there because backend systems are slow, not because of the front end application. You can say "oh but you can pre-render", but there are times when you can't. You could render the whole thing on the backend, but then you'll wait 5-7 seconds at a white page vs. progressive loading. Whatever is taking 5-7 seconds (LCP) is not going to get faster for you in your region by some magical front end dance.

Not every business is the same and no one solution will work for everyone. And concluding that we should "go back to jQuery" really speaks volumes of the author. jQuery was not "the good old days".

The problem with FE is that they seem to be wannabe nodejs BE devs instead of the W3C experts they should be. If FE devs focus on web standards and less on Rube Goldberg machines they would be well served.