There’s a magic word that can be used in scenarios like this: “No.”

Failing that, interpret the requirements.

Nobody can watch a bunch of videos at once that don’t even show up until you scroll! That’s a nonsense requirement and the dev’s failure to push back or redirect in a more viable direction is a sign of their incompetence, not that of the non-technical manager that saw YouTube’s interface and assumes that that’s normal and doable.

It is! You’d have to know about lazy loading and CDNs, but neither is black magic.

Man, I probably say no to like 40% of the requests I get as a dev. Often we will come up with a better way of doing things by just spending 15-30 mins talking to the business about the actual problem they are having.

Some are just flat out refused as they are just too stupid and will cripple the system in some way.