Here sucks is in the sense of suckless philosophy, I don’t think everybody likes the suckless movement but I’ve seen that many people, me included, don’t like how modern web apps look like (messenger and tiktok are like the worst). So if I want to make interactive web apps, what are the better technologies to not make the web shittier ?
JS is fine, it’s more that people overdo it and bundle their heavy, deeply layered frameworks with thousands of npm dependencies for the web. Often times analytics/tracking/ad libraries are a major contributor of bloat, I once shrunk down a package-lock from thousands of lines to a few hundred just by stripping the telemetry libraries from an open-source app.
Use the right tool for the job. Sometimes it’s a static page, sometimes a server-rendered dynamic page and sometimes a single-page application, all of those can be made performant.