Lots of second panel thinkers in these comments. Great case study.

There's plenty of irrationality to be found in opposing camps, too. I won't say that it's actually worse (because it's not), but it's definitely a lot more annoying, because it usually also carries overtones that there's a sort of well-informed moral and technological high ground—when it turns out it's usually just a bunch of second panel thinkers who themselves don't even understand computers (incl. compilers, system software, etc.) very well.

This is what makes it hard to have discussions about reforming the practices in mainstream Web development. The Web devs are doing awful things, but at least ~half of the criticism that these devs are actually exposed to ends up being junk because lots of the critics unfortunately just have no fucking idea what they're talking about and are nowhere near the high ground they think they're standing on—often taking things for granted that just don't make sense when actually considered in terms of the technological uppercrust that they hope to invoke. Just a kneejerk "browser = bad" association from people who can't meaningfully distinguish between JS (the language), browser APIs, and the NPM corpus (though most NPM programmers are usually guilty of exactly the same...).

It's a very "the enemy of my enemy is not my friend" sort of thing.

Second panel syndrome.

We have a word for this: "sophomoric".