I'm not sure I understand. Are you implying we should not design our technology around serious edge cases that humans encounter in life? Why wouldn't we target people in crisis when we design crisis management information sites?

It's not really written there, but how about a loading experience that gives you the important information, and then loads the bells and whistles as the JavaScript gets loaded and run. First make sure the plain text information gets loaded, maybe a simple JPEG when something graphical like a map is needed, and then load the Megabytes of React or Angular to make it all pretty and the map be interactive...

"Universal design" or "design for accessibility" will give you lots of examples of constraints that are not "commonly" needed ending up having much wider application and benefiting many other people.

Some oft-cited examples are curb cuts (the sloped ramps cut into curbs for sidewalk access) and closed-captioning (useful in noisy bars or at home with a sleeping baby).

There are many examples from the web where designing with constraints can lead to broadly more usable sites- from faster loading times (mobile or otherwise) to semantic markup for readers, etc.

This is the same attitude that results in modern developers ignoring low end consumer hardware, locking out a customer base because they aren't rich enough.

Get some perspective. Some of us have to live on 500kbit/s. The modern web is hell, and because it doesn't impact anybody with money, nobody gives a shit.

Please don't be curmudgeonly about others' curmudgeonliness. We're rather hoping for anti-curmudgeonliness on HN.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Every single time Github goes down there's no shortage of gnashing of teeth on HN about how we should all host our own repos and CI servers.