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I think it's funny that you think sites can't be attractive unless they include many megabytes of complex JS and CSS on every page. Craigslist lasted and was dominant a whole extra generation of the Web until Facebook Marketplace unseated it without even bothering with colors and certainly no animations. And FBM didn't win on clever animations and React UI complexity, it just won based on the fact that it was easier to detect Nigerian scammers since you can see when the buyer's FB account was created and a few other cues. Users don't care how clever your programmatic animations are. They hate how slow your site is. Look how much Jira sucks now. It's more sluggish on an M4 Pro than it was on my Core i5 in 2013 because of how much frontend bloat they've added in the meantime.

I hear your snark, but Reddit isn't exactly a beauty contest winner.

Yeah I was thinking "but..." ah but yes I use old.reddit.com. well, case in point.

This seems like a rather knee-jerk response to someone arguing that they can build the same UI with less.

Exactly this! I wish the entire web was easier to read on my e-ink device.