The Case for Simplicity: Reducing Abstraction Layers in Modern Web and Mobile Development

The web development ecosystem in 2024-2025 faces a critical inflection point.
DEV Community
Fresh React projects commonly show 99+ vulnerabilities in npm audit, with developers reporting that "I blinked and my app was ancient."
Overreacted
Bundle sizes have exploded to 7MB+ for typical React applications, while build times stretch to 10+ minutes.
Ashish Maurya's Blog
Meanwhile, companies like 37signals have demonstrated that modern applications can run on 60KB of JavaScript instead of megabytes, achieving better performance and developer happiness.

This report examines the compelling evidence for reducing abstraction layers in favor of simpler, more direct approaches—while acknowledging when complex frameworks remain necessary.

Modern React projects have become engineering nightmares. A typical optimization journey involves reducing bundles from 7MB to 700KB—requiring webpack expertise that many teams lack.
Ashish Maurya's Blog
The State of React Native 2024 survey reveals developers frustrated with the "new architecture" that was "marketed as almost ready for six years" but still suffers from instability and regressions.
SSOJet

The dependency management crisis has reached absurd proportions. One developer's experience captures the zeitgeist: "I had react 18.30 and now it's 19. My MUI version is now deprecated and I only installed it 6 months ago."
DEV Community
The rapid deprecation cycles force constant updates, with 62% of developers citing technical debt as their biggest frustration—double any other concern.
Stack Overflow

React Native apps commonly ship 1MB+ JavaScript bundles, with some reporting 20+ second initial load times.
Writtify
The JavaScript-to-native bridge creates fundamental performance bottlenecks that no amount of optimization can fully resolve. Debugging has devolved to console.log being the primary tool, as React Native's debugger remains broken according to the 2024 survey.
SSOJet

Most tellingly, Airbnb's famous exit from React Native revealed a fundamental truth: despite 80,000 lines of React Native code, they "wound up supporting code on three platforms instead of two," negating the promised efficiency gains.
medium

Medium
Current migration patterns show teams moving to micro-frontend approaches or native development, seeking escape from the complexity trap.

Rails 8, released November 7, 2024, represents a philosophical shift toward radical simplicity.
Bacancy Technology
The Hotwire stack (Turbo + Stimulus) enables building sophisticated applications while shipping just 60KB of compressed JavaScript—
Hotwire Discussion
a 50x reduction compared to typical React apps.

HEY.com serves as the flagship example, running a full-featured email client competing with Gmail while maintaining a perfect 100 PageSpeed score. The mobile app consists of 100+ screens with only 1 built natively,
Wizville
demonstrating that web-first approaches can deliver native-feeling experiences. Critically, HEY generates multi-million dollar revenue, proving this isn't just a technical curiosity but a business success.

The productivity gains are striking. DHH claims Hotwire is learnable in a weekend versus 1-2 months for React.
Wizville

Wizville
Real-world testimonials support this: "Hotwire allowed us to build interactive features 10x faster than React."
Cycode
The reason is fundamental—developers stay in Rails/HTML/CSS without context switching, test one codebase instead of separate frontend/backend, and debug server-side logic that's inherently simpler to trace.
Wizville

Teams report that backend developers can now build complete UIs, eliminating the need for separate frontend specialists. The "full-stack developer" becomes genuinely full-stack rather than a euphemism for doing two jobs poorly.

Bearer's migration from React SPA to Hotwire revealed performance improvements across every metric:
Cycode

The secret lies in leveraging what browsers do best—rendering HTML—rather than reimplementing browser functionality in JavaScript.

Research reveals a stark hierarchy in AI coding assistant effectiveness based on abstraction levels. GitHub Copilot delivers 20-25% productivity gains for frontend monolithic applications but only 5-7% gains for backend microservices.
ELEKS
The pattern is clear: AI performance correlates directly with training data availability and pattern simplicity.

Popular frameworks like React show "significant productivity surge" due to extensive representation in training datasets.
ELEKS

Rootstack
However, custom abstractions and company-specific architectural patterns confuse AI assistants, reducing their effectiveness to near zero. As Simon Willison observes, AI tools work best as "a weird intern who has memorized all of the documentation"—they excel at standard patterns but struggle with clever abstractions.
The Register

The research demonstrates clear advantages for simpler code structures:

One developer's insight captures the shift: "I'm almost picking programming languages at this point based on whether there will be enough training data in GPT-4 for it to be useful."
The Register
This creates a powerful feedback loop favoring simplicity—the most productive developers use the simplest, most common patterns that AI understands best.

The No Build philosophy, championed by DHH, leverages modern browser capabilities to eliminate complex build processes entirely. For the first time in 15 years, the state of the art isn't finding more sophisticated ways to build JavaScript—it's not building at all.

Rails 7+ implements this through import maps, using native ES modules that browsers consume directly.
Medium
The benefits are transformative:

37signals provides the most compelling case study. By embracing simplicity across their stack, they:

The philosophy extends beyond Rails. Similar movements include the return from microservices to monoliths (Netflix, Shopify, Prime Video), NoSQL to SQL migrations, and Go's deliberate feature restriction. Rob Pike's insight resonates: "Less is exponentially more."
Dave Cheney

WalkMe's 2024 report reveals the staggering cost of technology complexity: the average large enterprise loses $104 million annually due to underutilized technology, disjointed strategy, and low adoption.
CIO Dive
Meanwhile, 43% of enterprise tech stacks have become more complex over three years, with nearly half of IT investments failing to deliver ROI.
CIO Dive

The hidden costs multiply:

Companies embracing simpler stacks report dramatic improvements:

The talent advantage is particularly striking. Simple technologies like Python, JavaScript, and Rails have massive talent pools, enabling 64% faster hiring through larger candidate pools and referrals.
LinkedIn
Complex specialized skills command premium salaries while constraining growth.

Despite the compelling case for simplicity, research identifies specific thresholds where frameworks become essential:

Team size thresholds:

Application complexity thresholds:

Performance thresholds:

Certain use cases legitimately require framework sophistication:

Netflix demonstrates the nuanced approach—they moved away from React for simple landing pages (achieving 50% performance improvement) while keeping it for complex interactive applications.
Medium +2

The evidence overwhelmingly supports adopting simpler technology stacks as the default choice, with complexity added only when specific thresholds are exceeded. Teams should:

The most successful approach mirrors Netflix's selective adoption:

The financial case for simplicity is compelling:

The hidden benefit is risk reduction—simpler systems have fewer points of failure, require less specialized knowledge, and adapt more easily to changing requirements.

The pendulum has swung too far toward complexity. While React and similar frameworks solved real problems, they've created new ones that often outweigh their benefits.
Social+

Rootstack
The combination of AI-assisted development, modern browser capabilities, and frameworks like Rails 8 + Hotwire provide a path back to sanity.
DataCamp +3

Companies like 37signals prove that billion-dollar businesses can run on minimal JavaScript.
Stimulus +2
The "No Build" movement demonstrates that modern browsers have evolved beyond our outdated assumptions. Most importantly, the business metrics—from development velocity to infrastructure costs—overwhelmingly favor simplicity.

The future belongs to teams who do more with less, who leverage platform capabilities rather than fighting them, and who recognize that complexity should be a temporary price for progress, not a permanent feature of software development.
Hey
As DHH argues, we've reached the point where not building is the new building.
Hey

The question isn't whether to simplify, but how quickly you can start.