One bad thing about the cycle is we never get to stop dealing with the problem. Because we’re in a cycle of destruction and renewal, applications rot as the infrastructures under them become incompatible.

Where people stopp trying to make “pluggable systems” and “platforms” and instead tried to actually solve problems with finality, and to create procedural interfaces that cover a clear cone of responsibility, the result is mature libraries that stop changing, and become bedrock under applications.

I won’t say it’s “bad” not to strive for that. It is a unique challenge you may or may not wish to tackle.

One person’s bedrock is another person’s pile of anachronisms, cruft, and poorly designed abstractions held together with duct tape.

Bedrock in this sense is small tools that you either build on or you don’t.

What you’re describing is different:

“Abstractions” are by definition unnecessary, they are imaginary things which imperfectly model of some real things underneath. They are contrasted with control systems, which strive to manipulate those things without any metaphor.

“Cruft” is items which you don’t need that are bundled with items you do need. It is contrasted with tools that are easy to just not use at all.

I don’t know what anachronism means in this context.

I’m not saying it’s easy to make tools that are neither abstract, nor bundled with unrelated things. Just that it is a place you can aim for.

I disagree with your notion that abstractions and cruft are inevitable. They’re not inevitable, they are encouraged in the present development climate.

Personally, I take the “run everywhere the same” aspect of web sites very seriously, so I don’t think bleeding edge browser features are an important part of the solution for me.

I also don’t think “build pipelines” are part of the solution.

But I do support you pursuing your vision of finality. Mine is pretty different, you can look up “browser bridge” on NPM if you are interested.

Every widely supported feature was once a bleeding-edge feature.

I'm not sure how you can about finding fundamental enduring solutions to platform gaps that user-space tools solve without adding platform features. That's always going to create a period where some browsers support a feature and some don't, and we've _always_ had to deal with that. It won't be different here.

I mention build pipelines because that's what most bundlers actually are. If they drop the bundling part, they can just focus on that.

I think platforms “mature”, and nothing important happens after that. The web was mature around the time WebGL was widely adopted. Bundles don’t do anything we can’t already do. They just make the web more brittle.

Which means: lovely for you, until something snaps.

For me that’s two cons: lost users, and a more complex data model. And no pros.

The way things are going it suffices that Chrome and Safari do it.

I really hope that by separating Web Bundles from signed exchanges that Firefox will get on board. And I really hope that Firefox retains and gains relevance somehow.