Take a step back and look at the pile of overengineered yet underthought, inefficient, insecure and complicated crap that we call the modern web…

Think about how many indirections and half-baked abstraction layers are between your code and what actually gets executed.

Think about that, and then…what, exactly? As a website author, you don’t control the browser. You don’t control the web standards.

I’m extremely sympathetic to this way of thinking, because I completely agree. The web is crap, and we shouldn’t be complacent about that. But if you are actually in the position of building or maintaining a website (or any other piece of software), then you need to build on what already exists, unless you’re in the exceedingly rare position of being able to near-unilaterally make changes to an existing platform (as Google does with Chrome, or Microsoft and Apple do with their OSes) or to throw out a huge amount of standard infrastructure and start as close to “scratch” as possible (e.g. GNU Hurd, Mill Computing, Oxide, Redox OS, etc; note that several of these are hobby projects not yet ready for “serious” use).