Their app is 2x slower than their mobile site and their new mobile site is 4x slower than their old site. Why do these brands feel the need to make everything a fucking SPA.
Plus the constant nag to install the app on mobile, and sometimes even downright blocking access and "see in the app". (For now there's still "old." subdomain which works if you enable desktop emulation on mobile, but it can shut down any day).
The fact that "old." still works is a pretty strong indication that the new redesign is to ensure new users will tolerate manipulation while retaining a large portion of the old users. Looking at the ratio of old/new site users is probably a very powerful analytics tool for predicting ad revenue for a given subreddit.
I don't think a SPA is the problem, in fact a well-made (end to end) SPA should be faster after an initial, cacheable load. It's the fact that it isn't well-made and it's bloated with god knows what.
The entire field of front-end engineering needs to take a step back and think about the user instead of overengineering every problem and constantly changing things just to justify their job existing.
As a front-end engineer I don't feel any pressure to justify my job. The issue of "constantly changing things" tends to be completely out of our hands, so work is pretty abundant.
That said, I agree with you in principal. In this field I feel like I'm constantly fighting to keep the code simple and lean, while others think it's okay to import an entire bloated library just to make a button shine a certain way.
If you look at the past 30 years of frontend, I don't think you'd find a place where you would want to pause the change. The IE 6 era? The Flash era? The jQuery era?
