It's worrying that the US might be doing the same thing but without openly saying it. Little is being done here about the virus. Most people can't get tested. The Senate took a vacation. The Republican Party doesn't want older and unhealthy people depending on social programs. Pray the virus away. Suffering will bring people to God.
"I think it is very beautiful for the poor to accept their lot, to share it with the passion of Christ. I think the world is being much helped by the suffering of the poor people." --Mother Teresa
This is how some people think. It seems like there are no serious people in charge. It's going to be a catastrophe like we have never experienced.
Reading about it, I realized I've built stuff like this for a long time. I built websites with Hugo and other static HTML generators before that, adding React components to make some pages dynamic and calling into an API for some of the user interaction. The simplest case of this was a contact form in React which posted to /api/contact, a simple Ruby server which sent emails.
Some "dynamic" server side content was also easily included in a cronjob. That way I fetched the Twitter feed of a few accounts and rendered this into the static HTML.
I did it, because it was really fast to build, could scale, development and deployment was easy for the HTML, etc.
What I didn't had at the time was FaaS and I think the architecture could benefit from this. I had Docker containers running the API and the reverse proxy needed to do some routing, so I still had a server running, but I didn't need a database. I had to teach the marketing department how to write Markdown in GitLab editors, though.
I think there is hope. Ask sites for RSS feeds (especially podcasts, which often forget to link to the RSS feeds). Build interesting new things with it that inspire other people to build things with it. Convince browsers to make RSS friendlier. Mozilla should have Firefox at least tell people what do with RSS when they click the button instead of downloading a raw XML file: "you clicked an RSS feed -- would you like to download this extension to read it?"
The reality is that we're at the mercy of clients and bosses, and I don't see that changing. Every once in awhile someone will come along that realizes they have hired professionals, and trust the professionals to their job. But that's about 1 in 10, in my experience.
It's also the professional's job to convince the boss why their ideas are bad. "This is considered animation spam." or "This is considered a bad practice, but this other way is more effective." or "Our tests have shown that users are annoyed by X."
Material Design has many other bad ideas in it too.
Examples: the color suggestions are garish. The idea that a website should simulate physical motion has usability problems for people with motion sensitivity. There is a lack of aesthetic restraint. It encourages gratuitous animation spam, like the ripple effect. It's like a cake where 50% of the cake is frosting.
Some of those things could be fixable, but I think it's unwise for other companies to adopt Google's visual branding in general.
