Web development is fun again - faster tooling, saner stacks, better defaults

A lot of the yak has quietly been shaved. Under the hood, modern toolchains built on Rust and Go (SWC, esbuild, Turbopack) plus Vite’s dev server have made cold starts and HMR feel instant, not interruptive. Bun’s all‑in‑one runtime, test runner, and installer shrink the “install-config-build” grind, while Node’s steady ESM/Web API alignment reduces the need for shims. On the browser side, Baseline/Interop efforts mean features like container queries, :has(), CSS nesting, and import maps are broadly safe to reach for-less transpilation, fewer polyfills, more shipping. What’s notable here isn’t another framework logo; it’s that the defaults finally align with performance and developer flow.

The bigger picture is a swing back to server‑first pragmatism. React Server Components and Server Actions, Remix’s loaders/actions, Astro’s islands, and HTML‑over‑the‑wire patterns (Hotwire, LiveView, htmx) let teams trim client bundles without sacrificing interactivity. Edge and serverless platforms standardize preview deploys and caching knobs, so the path from “git push” to a fast page is shorter and cheaper. Worth noting: this isn’t hype about “no JavaScript”-it’s right‑sizing it, with clearer boundaries and fewer bespoke build steps. For indie hackers and product teams alike, the implication is simple: less time babysitting tooling, more time shipping features, with performance wins that fall out of choosing the platform instead of patching around it.