Regrettably, nobody bothers to mention that JavaScript is really what's to blame for all of this. If unnecessary use of JavaScript earned the same sort of derision that "best viewed in IE 6" banners did, we wouldn't be where we are today.
That genie is too far gone to put back in the bottle, but that's the real problem with the online advertising 'ecosystem'. JavaScript enabled pop-up ads, it enables tracking, it enables coinminers and other malware.
I imagine you’re being downvoted because your post comes across as another smug designer/product person saying “I know better than you, you uneducated philistine”, with a side of “you just haven’t seen it done right and your personal experience is wrong.”
I’m sure Reddit’s abortion of a redesign has went through hundreds of rounds of UX testing and has been signed off on by the masters of the field, but it’s still slow, unnecessary, and buggy. It does everything worse than the existing design, except perhaps for increasing some sort of pointless dashboard metric users don’t care about.
That genie is too far gone to put back in the bottle, but that's the real problem with the online advertising 'ecosystem'. JavaScript enabled pop-up ads, it enables tracking, it enables coinminers and other malware.