Yeah. That's one of the many reasons I wrote a damned rant about how fed up I am with front-end. It's insane to think web sites telling you about cars or coffee need 1MB+ to do so.

But it happens because front-end tooling makes it so fucking easy to write complicated, bloated code.

Most of my time and energy these days is deleting shit. I delete more than I write. But my proudest achievement was like 7 years ago when I was asked to add a Japanese font.

Took me 6 weeks. I deleted like 15% of the CSS in the process.

Why did it take so long, and why did it require deleting 15% of the code?

Because the dorks on the project used Sass for literally every line. So I had like 400+ instances of someone applying a font-family spread across 80 Sass files. Not a single.fucking.HTML.element received a style. Not. One.

There was no font-family declared anywhere that it could be inherited down.

So over three sprints I had to move the font-declarations into mixins, then onto raw elements, then actually delete the mixins on the classes. Eventually I got it down to like 18 instances of declaring the font family.

and then I wrote another 18 instances where I could apply the Japanese font.

Adding a Japanese font reduced the size of the CSS by 15%.

front-end work doesn't click with most front-end devs, either.