The cunningham's-law-optimal way is to not ask, surely. Either that or the some programmers equivalent of the "death drive".

> canvas

Indeed, the canvas is basically inevitable, but it's a bespoke chart that has both temporal and non-temporal data in it (not sure what the terminology should be, but imagine plotting market expectations of interest rates in future and what expectations were historically displayed relative to current levels - but repeated ~200 times), so the existing chart libraries aren't particularly helpful and can get in the way of being able to click on stuff.

Anecdotally I find that programmers are very good at writing charts for the kinds of data they understand (time series, time series of their stock options, etc), but even the "generic" (e.g. grammar of graphics) libraries can still struggle with simple combinations of those domains.

Obviously you can just treat the charting library as a black-box for which you derive coordinate transformations and make things appear in the right place but not a great bus-factor for that kind of code.

I use https://github.com/leeoniya/uPlot for sparklines and so on, very fast.