Of course, having that in mind, browse normally and think what parts of it are actually adding and what is subtracting from the goal, sooner than later you'll notice how much is not only useless, is actually worsen the experience. Tables, list, "cards", buttons, icons, images and forms are easily done without any JS and responsive, just well applied CSS. Of course you can add as much eye candy you want, unless it takes away something more important, dev.to is a good example, all they have done and yet the page is very fast, works very well and doesn't eat halve my RAM nor my poor little CPU, more evidence that it can be done.
I've yet to see a carousel that actually make things better, to me are always annoying, a 5MB hero image taking the whole viewport with a button in the middle to go to the content has never made my experience better, it actually make me scroll for nothing and click for the same reason, background animations, or any animation for that matter, stock images, etc. Why would I want to wait for a photo of a coffee mug with papers in a desk or of a random office in the middle of a presentation?, the thing is that people often go straight to JS, even JS for links and static images for god sake. Rarely things are absolute, of course it may exist a case for carousels, just like the case for having an AK-47 and grenades, do I think those are most of the cases?, that when you buy a house those are the first items I purchase? would be the world a better place if more people have an AK-47 and a couple of grenades? I don't thinks so. Should we eradicate AK-47 and grenades because nobody needs them? I don't think so either. I would eradicate JS carousels tho :)
And in fact all of the "shinny effects" you mentioned can be done with CSS, just good old CSS. You can actually do a lot with flexboxes and grids nowadays and you can always use media queries to depend on the viewport size, I hate them, but you can. Of course you may have to make an extra effort and be more clever but the same had to be done with the goto idiom, of course it helped to make some stuff but it wasn't worth the cost. Using a lot of JS may feel more great, powerful and awesome than CSS but we are working to make good things not to boost our ego, well..., we shouldn't.
I definitely agree that most layout can and should be done with plain HTML and CSS, and I also dislike obnoxiously large hero images and carousels. Gimmicks are bad, but features that empower users are good, and some of these features are challenging to make responsive because you can't just rely on the natural way things flow on a page. This doesn't mean you can't solve these problems with CSS. You should! It's just not always going to be easy.
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Of course, having that in mind, browse normally and think what parts of it are actually adding and what is subtracting from the goal, sooner than later you'll notice how much is not only useless, is actually worsen the experience. Tables, list, "cards", buttons, icons, images and forms are easily done without any JS and responsive, just well applied CSS. Of course you can add as much eye candy you want, unless it takes away something more important, dev.to is a good example, all they have done and yet the page is very fast, works very well and doesn't eat halve my RAM nor my poor little CPU, more evidence that it can be done.
I've yet to see a carousel that actually make things better, to me are always annoying, a 5MB hero image taking the whole viewport with a button in the middle to go to the content has never made my experience better, it actually make me scroll for nothing and click for the same reason, background animations, or any animation for that matter, stock images, etc. Why would I want to wait for a photo of a coffee mug with papers in a desk or of a random office in the middle of a presentation?, the thing is that people often go straight to JS, even JS for links and static images for god sake. Rarely things are absolute, of course it may exist a case for carousels, just like the case for having an AK-47 and grenades, do I think those are most of the cases?, that when you buy a house those are the first items I purchase? would be the world a better place if more people have an AK-47 and a couple of grenades? I don't thinks so. Should we eradicate AK-47 and grenades because nobody needs them? I don't think so either. I would eradicate JS carousels tho :)
And in fact all of the "shinny effects" you mentioned can be done with CSS, just good old CSS. You can actually do a lot with flexboxes and grids nowadays and you can always use media queries to depend on the viewport size, I hate them, but you can. Of course you may have to make an extra effort and be more clever but the same had to be done with the goto idiom, of course it helped to make some stuff but it wasn't worth the cost. Using a lot of JS may feel more great, powerful and awesome than CSS but we are working to make good things not to boost our ego, well..., we shouldn't.
I definitely agree that most layout can and should be done with plain HTML and CSS, and I also dislike obnoxiously large hero images and carousels. Gimmicks are bad, but features that empower users are good, and some of these features are challenging to make responsive because you can't just rely on the natural way things flow on a page. This doesn't mean you can't solve these problems with CSS. You should! It's just not always going to be easy.