> Don't get me started on airlines websites

You can't beat China Southern . They have the most dog shit website I've ever seen. The flight was fine but I gave up doing online check in after 3 attempts. Never mind the bloat:

- required text fields with wrong or missing labels. One field was labeled "ticket no.". It kept getting rejected. I randomly tried passport number instead. It worked.

- sometimes fields only have a placeholder that you can't fully read because the field has not enough width ("Please enter the correct...") and the placeholder disappears once you start typing.

- date picker is randomly in Chinese

- makes you go through multi step seat selection process only to tell you at the end that seat selection is not possible anymore.

- signed up with email; logged out and went back to the SAME login page; now sign up via phone number is required!?

How can we go back to a Web where websites are designed to be used by the user and not for the shareholders?

Loudly oppose the trendchasing devs who have been brainwashed into the "newer is better" mindset by Big Tech. I'm sure the shareholders would want to reduce the amount they spend on server/bandwidth costs and doing "development and maintenance" too.

Simple HTML forms can already make for a very usable and cheap site, yet a whole generation of developers have been fed propaganda about how they need to use JS for everything.

> How can we go back to a Web where websites are designed to be used by the user and not for the shareholders?

Or for developers to pad their CV.

Sadly, I think the only answer is some other form of payment than ad clicks. I've no idea what that could be, though.