there’s clearly some Stallman level hyperbole in here that makes this rant (that i mostly agree with) hard to take seriously.

one thing that stands out to me is that the author speaks with authority on the way the web and HTTP are “supposed to be”, and as someone who has been in a crash course in application networking systems the past couple of years, i wonder: why does no one agree on what the web is “supposed to be”? people will recite RFCs at each other like Bible verses and similarly will show contradiction between RFCs or RFCs that are simply not adhered to (we spent a long time on cookies once that different browsers treated differently, where Chromium wasn’t following the RFC). this is kind of my problem with the application layer as it exists today: it feels like feature bloat from parties over generations that have tried to assert their vision for it, Cloudflare in this case like Chromium and others before.

maybe i’m the crazy one, but it feels like there’s room for disruption in this layer.