[pmilot]

This again...

If you really believe that the "decline in quality of the web" can be attributed to web developers, then I'm sorry but you're just not seeing the big picture.

Marketers want more and more precise user tracking and analytics.

Designers want bigger and heavier images (and videos!) embedded directly in a website's homepage. They want custom, web-unfriendly fonts that have to be downloaded.

Financial stakeholders want cleverer, more intrusive ads that can bypass ad blockers.

And users want desktop apps that they can "install" by bookmarking a URL.

What can devs do about this? Nothing. Refuse to engage in it? Someone else will gladly take your job. In the end, there were clear economic incentives for the web to evolve this way. In this capitalistic economy, there was just no other possible direction.

I have ten years of experience in professional web development. I personally hate Javascript too. It's a terrible language and an even more terrible ecosystem. But in the end, you can write good software in anything. What you don't let like about the web today has little to do with the technology it is built on... Or the people developing for it.

[na85]

So instead of having a spine and/or ethics, when marketers and financial stakeholders come asking for more intrusive ads and better tracking, what have javascript developers done?

They have been enablers. Every single time.

[shard972]

What's your point? That every javascript developer is unethical because companies are hiring javascript developers to do bad things?