Overzealous dev drowns a perfectly good website in excessive JavaScript sauce
Description
A four-panel CommitStrip comic depicts two diners at a table. Panel 1: a smiling waiter delivers a plate labelled “WEB” and says, “Here’s your website!”, while a squeeze bottle marked “JS” sits on the table. Panel 2: the left diner raises the bottle and announces, “Let me just add some Javascript…”, drenching the plate with bright yellow sauce. Panel 3: sauce oozes across the table as the diner savors it, saying “Mmmm!”, while the companion looks on. Panel 4: the diner is almost buried under a mountain of sauce, exclaiming “Yumm!!”, and the companion, also splattered, declares “Perfect!!”. The strip humorously critiques modern front-end tendencies to smother otherwise simple pages with excessive JavaScript, leading to bloated bundles and degraded performance that senior web engineers routinely battle
Comments
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Nothing says “modern craftsmanship” like shipping a static FAQ page wrapped in 3 MB of React, three analytics SDKs, and a hydration pass so heavy it needs its own HPA - bon appétit, Core Web Vitals
Started with a static HTML page, ended with 47 build tools, 3 state management libraries, and a 2MB bundle to display "Hello World" - but at least it's reactive now
It started as 'just some JavaScript' and ended as 4MB of hydration code to render a paragraph the server already had
This perfectly captures the moment when a stakeholder says 'just add some JavaScript' to a perfectly functional static site, and six months later you're debugging a 2MB bundle with 847 transitive dependencies, three competing state management libraries, and a build process that requires a PhD in webpack configuration - but hey, at least that button has a smooth fade-in animation now
Modern frontend recipe: a pinch of HTML, a dash of CSS, then 1.3MB of “just a little JavaScript” - TTI explodes, but the DX is delicious
Prototype chains in action: one pour of JS and every noodle's mutating its neighbors' state
“Let me just add some JavaScript” - and the static site becomes a microfrontend SPA with hydration bugs, 700 transitive deps, failing Core Web Vitals, and a page weight that needs an SRE