Author here. At the time, Angular relied a lot on the AOT compiler and tree shaking to keep bundle sizes down. No idea if this is still the case.
If we built the app with the stable branch the bundle size was orders of magnitude smaller: less than 200kb. Still a bit of a chonker, but more reasonable than the ridiculousness the experimental SSR branch spat out.
It could have been any technology. The silver bullet is choosing the right tool for the job.
I don’t have an attachment to any particular tech. At the time React was what I knew, and I was coming off the back of building a server side rendered React site when I joined this company. I had a team of JavaScript-focused engineers to work with.
Author here. It was a gamble, but I was fighting against a very strong sunk cost fallacy in leadership at the company at the time, and there was a general lack of trust in the entire technical team. I *would not* recommend this approach as a typical way of doing business, and maybe I didn’t do a good enough job at communicating that in the post. This is the only time in my career I’ve delivered this kind of ultimatum.
Everything about this particular situation was exceptional. I focused on the decision to do a rewrite in the post because I thought it was the more interesting part of the story. In hindsight I might have gotten that wrong.
I’m proficient enough that I can work on anyone else’s machine well, and I have the comfort and speed benefits on my main workstation.