On Second Thought — Episode 07 Open any modern site. The utility provider's login, the restaurant booking, the parcel tracker. The laptop fan spins up to render text. The median page in 2025 ships 697 KB of JavaScript before a single character of content is visible. The browser, meanwhile, is asked to do the work that a server in 1996 already did, and to do it on a battery, on a metered connection, on a chassis warm enough to taste. This is the post about that. The Axiom The reflex is universal. Every new web project begins with a frontend framework, a build pipeline, a bundler, a hydration strategy. The server, where the data already lives, has been reduced to a JSON tap. Rendering is the browser's problem now. Nobody quite remembers when this was decided. It was not decided in any single meeting, or with any single argument. It compounded. Each project chose the framework because the previous project had; each developer learned the framework because that was the job posting.…