In the old days if you encountered a badly-coded website, you could often fix it with tools like TamperMonkey: Hack a little JavaScript, and you could fix the worst of the site’s abuses, or even make it nicer and add features the original developers didn’t (or couldn’t) add. Everything was fairly open, so you could just drop new script on the page, and even substitute out functions if you had a better implementation.
We now live in a reality driven by WebPack, where every website’s JavaScript is packed, minified, bundled, and, importantly, smashed together inside a closure, making all of its innards and mechanics hidden and encapsulated, hidden even from its own code.
That’s great for application stability, if you have good developers. But it also means that the app you get is the app you get: Every bug, every design flaw, and every misfeature is hidden away inside that bundled ball — which means that no matter how bad it is, you can’t fix somebody else’s broken website anymore.
