I agree with you on one level-- I think people on HN are generally overly critical of projects like this which are clearly huge accomplishments and the culmination of tons of effort... But on the flip side, I think it's plenty valid to look at projects like this as case studies into why modern web tooling isn't up to the standards of the tooling of 20 years ago (on much less performant hardware no less). Even within the browser, decades old flash games run circles around their JS contemporaries.