Tell that to the developers that are 5 years, 1 million lines and 500 TODOs deep into their legacy React banking frontend. Adding stuff on top of your existing hacks is easy, taking unnecessary code away is hard. Especially if all your training on web accessibility was a one-day workshop where you never actually learned how to do anything, only why you need to do it.

Source: I used a frontend developer working on a big bank frontend. The existing UI stack was horrendous and deadlines and bank politics wouldn’t allow you to refactor anything. Just build shit on top and hope that Jenga tower of a web application doesn’t fall apart halfway there.

Thank you so much for sharing this! This is absolutely exactly how it feels.

I believe the most important point here is the internal business politics that allows such an approach in development. Once I was curious and tried to find out how private banks' front ends look, and I was surprised to learn that they used minimal frameworks (sometimes none) and obviously zero external resources.

One thing is clear: if the business structure allows 10MB for a login page, this is not only about the front-end, this could be about all services and could spread much wider.

BTW, the bank that we use (with the 10MB login page) totally sucks in every aspect of business relations as well.