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.
It basically boils down to: (a) 90s web developers tended not to have computer science backgrounds and weren't aware of fundamentals -> (b) when js frameworks exploded in popularity and diversity in the 00s, there was much wheel reinventing, because those developers (and to a lesser degree framework inventors) were often ignorant of wheels -> (c) there are persistent, fundamental mistakes* in the web ecosystem that could have been fixed at the start if anyone with experience had been asked.
All of those people are now the vibe coders of the 20s, and it's going to end up in the same dumpster fire of 'Who knew it might be a good idea to cryptographically sign and control library packages in a public repository?'
* Note: I'm distinguishing things going sideways despite best intentions and careful planning from YOLO + 'Oops, how could that possibly have happened?' shit
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.
