Alexander Petros makes a good argument for choosing the platform:

If you built a website with styled-components in 2019, didn’t think about the styles for a couple years, and then tried to upgrade it in 2023, you would be two major versions behind. Good luck with the migration guide. CSS files, on the other hand, are evergreen.

When was the last time you had to read the “upgrade guide” for CSS or HTML?

make a server that responds to HTTP requests with HTML text. That is the most durable, cost-effective, and user-friendly way to build a web service. Most web services should be built this way absent an excellent reason not to.

Also: I love plain text.

There’s no magic that makes HTML text become HTML code.

Alexander Petros has a great overview of how you track values through a codebase and change things over time:

it’s important to have grace for the process by which a codebase grows, which necessarily leaves behind knots and scars as indicators of progress.

my whole attitude towards a website changes if it feels like an SPA. Subconsciously, I know that I have to baby it…The smoothness of a web application is an anti-indicator of its reliability and predictability as a web page.

This is so true.

As a user, I’m always much happier when presented with a form that is entirely on one page, or has a “hard” submit button for each step that takes me to a new page, as opposed to a “seamless” form that exists as a blob of JS state. The former has relatively predictable submit, autocomplete, and back button behavior, while the latter varies widely by implementation.

As a user, I always feel more at ease in a classic web form for bureaucratic data collection.

Lastly, here’s the kicker: your team can’t out-engineer the browser.

The browser will continuously improve the experience of plain HTML, at no cost to you, using a rendering engine that is orders of magnitude more efficient than JavaScript. To beat that, you need to be continuously investing significant engineering effort into cutting-edge application work.

sticking with the web primitives rewards developers over time.