“Partisans for slow, complex frameworks have successfully marketed lemons as the hot new thing, despite the pervasive failures in their wake, crowding out higher-quality options in the process.”
Russell applies Akerlof’s lemons paper to frontend JavaScript. The frameworks came out of shops with latency budgets, performance teams and ship gates, and got sold to teams with none of that. He says the omissions turned into “intentional prevarication” by 2017, and he handed the evidence to the marketers himself. Users pay for every rewrite a manager wanted to take credit for.