>Strawmanning the alternative as CGI with shell scripts really makes the entire post that much weaker.

I wasn't trying to strawman it--I was genuinely trying to show the historical progression. The snark was intended for the likely HN commenter who'd say this without reading, but the rest of the exploration is sincere. I tried to do it justice but lmk if I missed the mark.

>Be the change, maybe?

That's what I'm trying to do :-) This article is an argument for hypermedia as the API. See the shape of response here: https://overreacted.io/jsx-over-the-wire/#the-data-always-fl...

I think I've sufficiently motivated why that response isn't HTML originally; however, it can be turned into HTML which is also mentioned in the article.