Highlights two lessons. 1. If you ship it, you own it. Therefore the less you ship, the better. Keep dependencies to a minimum. 2. Keep non-critical things out of the critical path. A failing AC compressor should not prevent your engine from running. Very difficult to achieve in the browser, but worth attempting.
Even worse, it appears that PostHog dynamically updates their part of their code at runtime - not bundling it at build time. Their docs note an Advanced Option where all dependencies are bundled in the build. I mean, I get why, and maybe I am misunderstanding but as a user I would expect lazy loading of executable code to be an optimization rather than the default. And used only if fully bundling was a serious delivery delay.
These are valuable lessons for sure, but then someone from the marketing comes and demands you add PostHog or any other tracking script to the site and won't take no for an answer.
While I agree with you, this sounds like it could lead to a classic case of "that escalation worked, in the sense that it was heard".
Unless someone with decision-making power is going to be woken up at 4AM for a problem, they have very little incentive (intrinsic or extrinsic) to block a project on such nebulous claims as "Reducing dependencies" or "Less things on the critical path", if a business leader has come to them with a request.
Highlights two lessons. 1. If you ship it, you own it. Therefore the less you ship, the better. Keep dependencies to a minimum. 2. Keep non-critical things out of the critical path. A failing AC compressor should not prevent your engine from running. Very difficult to achieve in the browser, but worth attempting.