Oh, here comes the genius motherfucker with the big-brain counterargument: "Well, if HTML's so great, why not just write everything in Assembly, huh?". Wow, look at you, you clever little prick. Did you come up with that all by yourself? Writing web pages in Assembly is like using a fucking scalpel to slice your overcooked steak: sure, it'll get the job done, but you're gonna look like a complete asshole while you're at it. HTML just works, you absolute tool. It's been the backbone of the web since Al Gore flipped the switch, and it'll still be here long after your trendy framework is rotting in a GitHub graveyard. So take your smartass logic and shove it. HTML's king, and you're just a peasant with a keyboard.
I'd like full stack developers to try something. Next time you have an itch for a personal project, see if you can make it with no frontend JavaScript. Just some CSS and HTML forms. All templating handled on the backend. Just try it and see how far you get. Don't worry if it looks like a GeoCities page.
Then try finding places where JavaScript would make it more responsive or better UX in some way. Does the back button still work? Is it actually faster? Does it provide any benefit at all?
Like many things, you should use JavaScript if you need it. If you don't need remote data sources or live refreshes, pure html and css work perfectly fine and, I would go so far as to say, may even be necessary for resistance web pages.
This is especially true if you're using tor. JavaScript can leak your IP address and sites will work more reliability if you have static content that's refreshed on the back end than using a bloated next.js app taking up RAM.
The vast majority of those are useless animations. Some are even a much worse implementation of something done much simpler with JS and requires significantly more code weighing down the page speed. Some examples of this are the cursor tracking examples which use hundreds of divs in a grid.
While there are some useful examples, it seems like this repo is more of a list of to show off advanced CSS, fancy animations, and designs.
Depends firstly what you are building. For a Node backend, it of course matters a lot. For a JS frontend you always only ship a fraction of the dependency code, so the meme doesn't really apply. Modern JS frameworks are alright as long as you know what you are doing 🙂