Do you not care about most of your potential customers, or do you only cater to high net worth people? If so, then sure, substandard devices and connections can be ignored. If you’re Target, on the other hand, you probably shouldn’t ignore them.
I find it extremely odd that this was even a question on this site. Do you think the problem you’re solving should impact your tech stack at all, or is your tech stack more important than the problem?
You're making the same mistake as the author. I get unnecessarily aggro too, but a plain reading of their comment isn't "they only cater to high net worth people" or they're advocating for such. Its "hey we're talking about 3G connections at this point, which are mostly shut down, and we don't cover developing markets"
Note most of this is nonsensical too.
His primary thing is "you don't need client side code because JS = (HTML + CSS) * x, where X >= 1"
We can start sneering about not caring about users there, too, having a one time client side download of that magnitude can certainly be much better on the poors than 10 page loads with SSR.
I keep hearing the "SPA is actually lightweight" argument but it's never materialized for me, the fastest sites are SSRs that are mostly static. The saving from HTML vs JSON just isn't that much over the wire and mobile CPUs and memory are a bottleneck.
I have a newer iPhone and Safari is still full-refreshing pages constantly due to memory.
With utmost respect, that's not what I'm saying :)
I hold no hot take position on anything web dev, or any firm declarative position.
What I'm trying to get at is, indicia of an article being half-baked includes things like asserting all that's required to agree is to care about the user.
This feels good to say, but doesn't say anything, other than there's been at least some short-circuiting of thought. We can come up with many trivial cases where "caring about users" involves requiring client-side logic during rendering.
I find it extremely odd that this was even a question on this site. Do you think the problem you’re solving should impact your tech stack at all, or is your tech stack more important than the problem?