Author here. I really enjoyed diving into this topic and interviewing people. Minimalism in technology has a long history, and it's as important today as it's ever been. A favorite quote from the story, from Carson Gross, who made htmx:
“I might encourage minimalism in web development, but only because there's this incredibly complicated piece of software called a browser that has all this infrastructure baked into it that we can sit on top of. We can take advantage of that complexity and the abstraction it provides in a simple way, rather than putting a lot of complexity on top of that,” says Gross. “A lot of JavaScript projects take a browser and heap a bunch of incredibly complicated software on top without taking advantage of the infrastructure that the browser has sitting there.”
“I might encourage minimalism in web development, but only because there's this incredibly complicated piece of software called a browser that has all this infrastructure baked into it that we can sit on top of. We can take advantage of that complexity and the abstraction it provides in a simple way, rather than putting a lot of complexity on top of that,” says Gross. “A lot of JavaScript projects take a browser and heap a bunch of incredibly complicated software on top without taking advantage of the infrastructure that the browser has sitting there.”