I can't speak for the others, but when I talk about Reactive monsters, I am talking about needless complexity - both in setup and in usage.
I believe that the relative size of one library vs another (even outside of the reality of caching CDNs) is an unhelpful distraction from the bigger discussion around who should consider using which tools for which jobs, when.
The applications I'm working on are typically for people with usable broadband connections. If you build your site/app correctly, the pictures that are embedded in your content are often bigger than any of the libraries you could choose. However, it's the general responsiveness of your experience that people will judge your speed or "nativeness" by.
I do agree that the examples on the site are somewhat outdated, but the fact remains that there are a lot of nice things to say about that dang left column, with its predictable, intuitive and impressively terse invocations.
I worked for ~8 years using jQuery. It was an immense step forward in the early years, but these days I find the complexity of imperative code and juggling state from multiple sources a lot worse than the ‘complexity’ of a 100-line diff & patch algorithm that lets me simply redraw the whole world from state. And in the event I need to manipulate the DOM, the native APIs are now good enough, a couple extra lines are worth not having an extra dependency - jQuery’s (and zepto and so on) utility is diminished.
I believe that the relative size of one library vs another (even outside of the reality of caching CDNs) is an unhelpful distraction from the bigger discussion around who should consider using which tools for which jobs, when.
The applications I'm working on are typically for people with usable broadband connections. If you build your site/app correctly, the pictures that are embedded in your content are often bigger than any of the libraries you could choose. However, it's the general responsiveness of your experience that people will judge your speed or "nativeness" by.
I do agree that the examples on the site are somewhat outdated, but the fact remains that there are a lot of nice things to say about that dang left column, with its predictable, intuitive and impressively terse invocations.