Why has the web become so complex?
The article examines how the web has grown increasingly complex due to factors like heavy JavaScript frameworks, excessive tracking, and bloated websites, contrasting modern web development with the simplicity of the early internet and calling for a return to more lightweight, user-focused design principles.
Background
- The web began as a document system (simple HTML pages linked by URLs) but is now expected to act like a full application platform (Gmail, Figma, Google Docs). Those two jobs are fundamentally at odds.
- Early solutions like jQuery patched browser inconsistencies. Then Google pushed single-page apps (SPAs) and "JavaScript everywhere" via React, Angular, and Node.js, turning every page into a mini OS.
- This forced layers of new tooling: transpilers (Babel), bundlers (Webpack), package managers (npm), state managers (Redux), and meta-frameworks (Next.js). Each solved a real problem but added overhead for developers and download weight for users.
- CSS evolved slowly, so developers adopted CSS-in-JS, utility-first frameworks (Tailwind), and pre-processors (Sass) — often at the cost of runtime performance.
- The result is a "complexity tax": a simple static page now ships kilobytes of JavaScript because the toolchain assumes you're building a web app. The article argues this is not inevitable but accumulated debt from treating the web as something it was never designed to be.