a clean and functional site

But the specs no longer call for a clean, functional site. Today's "professional" web development specs call for user tracking, customized content per user per platform per locality the page is being served to. Then there's the backend dashboard services showing the overlords user behavior patterns and how they change based on tweaks made to their ui, I wouldn't be surprised if the algorithms auto-tune presentation to optimize behavior.

It's all the extra requirements, all the extra engineering that needs to be added that is IMO ruining web applications. Sure, they have huge benefits, but I hate when the application is simple but the backend is so overly engineered that it takes a week to completely build a fully fleshed out application. You have to organize your components, add styled-components.js, make sure it's compatible with mui.js, create test cases for each component, setup a DB and integrate it to hold all copy as well as any input from the customer, make sure that it's accessible (this part I admit that it's important), make sure your test cases always pass, setup routing tables, add analytics, add pixel campaign api, squash git conflicts, integrate some other weirdo apis that marketing and leadership pulled from some obscure service no one has ever heard off, debug some weird edge case error caused by a node dependency 3 levels down, present the finished website to leadership only to be destroyed and now you have to redo 75% of the site with leadership changes... rinse and repeat.

It's a good thing I fucking love my job 🙃