Because of all the laggy javascript, wasting precious compute and gigawatts of power just to make buttons dance, track us and shove ads up ours?

Websites used to be below 100KiB - now they come with MEGABYTES of obfuscated JS.. wtf

Though obviously, it's not the individual developer to blame but the incentive system.

The HN zeitgeist has something of a love/hate relationship with the web, I've noticed. HN in general seems to skew a little older than a lot of online communities, so a lot of HN users were adults back in the early days of the web/Usenet/etc. There's a tendency to view those days with nostalgia, leading a lot of people to feel like the "good old days" of the web were "ruined" by the modern shift into more interactivity, fancier/prettier design, etc. And "web developers" are the ones proximately responsible for the shift, so they get the hate too.

I laugh every time I see someone on HN asserting that the web "shouldn't" be used for anything beyond "documents and lightly interactive content", which is not uncomment. There's some real old-man-yelling-at-clouds energy there.

Have you used the web recently? It’s a mess. Most sites don’t actually work well. Everything is slow and bloated and ad-filled, pulling hundreds of megs from hundreds of hosts to display a single page covered in popup alerts, subscription begs, cookie warnings, and paywalls.