In the last 12 months, the median production JavaScript bundle grew to 221 KB gzipped, up 18 % year-over-year , while Lighthouse performance scores across the top 1,000 sites slipped from 58 to 52. Framework churn alone costs the industry an estimated $2.3 billion annually in rewrites, onboarding, and deprecated-package maintenance. The era of heavyweight JavaScript frameworks is ending—not with a bang, but with a standards-based whisper called Web Components and a compiler-driven performance engine called SolidJS 2.0 . If you are still reaching for React or Vue on a new project in 2026, you are choosing technical debt by default.…