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Downloading 60kb of compressed javascript takes way longer than executing it.

Executing 60kb of JS can take between 0s and infinity. You can't summarise it like this.

It's gonna sound elitist but every one of these confident assertions on the part of, for the purposes of discussion I'm assuming are defensive React developers, reinforces that a sizable contingent of the aforementioned developer community has no grasp whatsoever on the fundamentals of programming.

Hate me if you will, but holy fuck. "Downloading this code takes WAY more time than running it" with NO parameters whatsoever on what the code is doing is an absolutely ridiculous assertion.

Agreed. I don't think people realize that 5mb of a PNG is way different than 5mb of JS. The browser parsers that PNG way way faster than it parses JS.

The PNG also doesn’t then go off and start pulling even more data down off the network.

No, it comes across as if y'all are having a bad faith argument about something outside of your field of expertise...

Most React apps don't put an infinite loop in their components. The vast majority of the time it sets up initial state, maybe sets up a skeleton while loading some customer data, then shows a page with a few sections and a dozen inputs.

So "holy fuck" you should probably calm yourself down.

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