It's an SPA written in react, so unsurprisingly it requires javascript. Preloaders being harmful is purely your opinion, and your example of why they're harmful doesn't seem convincing to me.
I can see a case for a static version of the site being available, and I think with a bit more work they could have generated one from the react source.
That said, and this is more of a generalization, I think hacker news has a bias towards JS-free sites. Accessibility is an issue, but you can have a fully accessible JS-based site. JS can make it difficult for a scraper to interact with a site, but a separate xml (or whatever) document would be better to allow scraping anyway.
Basically, when developing a site at some point you decide how much effort you're going to put into supporting users who don't have javascript (usually out of choice), and for most people the answer is zero.
SPA is for apps, and websites are often better done with plain HTML. You don't need a megabyte of Javascript to display text with images.
I guess that people might prefer SPA because they are not very good at server programming or maybe they think it can make their resume look better (though I don't think choosing a complicated solution instead of simple one makes a good impression of an engineer).
Of course there are cases when you can't do without SPA: apps that work offline, interactive apps, online editors etc. But it doesn't make much sense to use SPA for a blog.
> at some point you decide how much effort you're going to put into supporting users who don't have javascript (usually out of choice), and for most people the answer is zero.
...until SEO people say that the site is poorly indexed so you need to generate a HTML version of the site. And you understand that it would be easier just to make a plain HTML site from the start.
I can see a case for a static version of the site being available, and I think with a bit more work they could have generated one from the react source.
That said, and this is more of a generalization, I think hacker news has a bias towards JS-free sites. Accessibility is an issue, but you can have a fully accessible JS-based site. JS can make it difficult for a scraper to interact with a site, but a separate xml (or whatever) document would be better to allow scraping anyway.
Basically, when developing a site at some point you decide how much effort you're going to put into supporting users who don't have javascript (usually out of choice), and for most people the answer is zero.