> "In urban planning they have a concept called "desire paths""

If you're wondering what that looks like, people post pictures of them found in the wild on Reddit:

https://reddit.com/r/DesirePaths/

> The platform APIs were terrible.

In what way?

After doing this for more than 20 years I have asked that question hundreds of times and the answer is almost always about aesthetics, about 95%+. Of those aesthetics based conclusions most people cannot find their own way to handle it without waiting for somebody else to write a tool that provides the answer they were looking for. Even then the answer tends to be predicated on social acceptance more than technical evaluation. That is a training or human performance problem more than a technical problem. It says a lot about an industry where the people who are able to ask these kinds of questions realize its a training problem and are willing to raise salaries and assume tech debt as opposed to fixing a human capital problem for far less money.

At any rate there is something to be said for the developer who builds things on their own just for themselves. In many cases the result is faster, lighter, and more capable software than what they are paid to do for their employer. Their personal software isn't locked into conventions or abstractions beyond their control.

I've been involved in successful and unsuccessful platform builds. In the successful ones, I either had absolute authority or I built for the desire paths, even if they weren't the "perfect" ones that I desired. I anchored on the non-negotiables, which I kept to a minimum, and then optimized to get people on board, even if that meant deviating from my perfect vision.

One way to keep myself honest in being on the desire path was to go from win to win (win = someone using platform and being a satisifed "customer") iteratively as part of the full build. It also helps avoid platform fatigue, and ensures that should some priorities change, we've gotten some value out of the effort.

There is even a book mentioned here a number of years ago - a particulae favorite of mine - that features this as a plot point: Squares of the City by John Brunner

There was a genre of YouTube shorts about Minecraft desire paths. The videos showed increasingly ridiculous attempts at stopping the desire path from forming. The joke of course being that dedicated Minecraft players will somehow make their way even through the unbreakable bedrock. And the admin/owner has to give up.

Unfortunately, the browser is not a Minecraft server. It's a living standard that has to maintain backwards compatibility. The desire path (React, Svelte,...) will always exist. And so will the ridiculous way they tried to stop that.

> if you don't put sidewalks and pathways in the right places, people invent their own.

To expand on that a bit, you can deliberately avoid putting in paths so that the natural behaviour becomes clear. You'll see paths develop between areas that you might not have thought of. Pedestrians are flattening grass and showing connections that are actually useful rather than following lines that have been set out for them with competing priorities in mind like aesthetics or budgets. Then you take that data and create paths that "users" actually want, based on their behaviour / use of the previous system.

The "fun" angle slots in perfectly with the other parallel false narrative about the devs who hate AI.

> building things yourself is just more fun

I can relate to this, but React definitely made things more fun for me at least.

Web Components on the other hand seemed to solve a problem that few actually were having, or for those that loathe React & modern frameworks because of bloat or whatever

> In urban planning they have a concept called "desire paths" where if you don't put sidewalks and pathways in the right places, people invent their own. I feel like the web community has spent a lot of time and effort patching the platform.

On my university campus there was a well-trod path across the grass where students would traverse in a beeline from their dorms to the cafeteria during mealtime.

Eventually they did put a walkway there. But for a time the only thing paving it was student footfalls.

I don't understand how WebComponents are such a poor idea. I have intentionally reached for them when building frontend code for most of my simple sites and they have been perfectly fine. Not great, but fine.

WebComponents do their job with little-to-no fuss, and they're universally available.