It's an excellent article, and the work within is very well done, but there's a part of me that screams "Why would you introduce this much complexity for what should be a simple scroll?" (overcoming technical hurdles to produce the desired end result aside).
Numerous autoplaying video methods for example especially when they follow the mouse, play in the background, or use lazy loading to be unkillable.
Speaking of lazy loading or whatever hundreds of variations probably exist around it now, the terrible front end devs of the world have decided to use that for everything. Everything is a sliding panel full of sliding panels and there’s no way to use browser back features coherently.
Scrolling down a site now loads a new site and destroys your history. Even if you scrolled to move content up because an autoplaying video anchored to the bottom of the screen is blocking the view. Scroll down too far causes a jump and the site decides you’re done and loads the next thing with no way to navigate back.
How do these developers have a job? How are features like this even invented with no critical thought or understanding of real world use cases questioned. It’s again and again and again that we see this.
And the Google team is so proud every time with their demo videos that is painfully obvious they put no thought into it outside of their bubble of them deciding some random thing was technically possible to do as a proof of concept and should therefore be immediately released as a fully supported feature.
Do you really think nobody asked for that? And maybe for something even more obnoxious than that?
(I use Firefox with uBlock Origin to preserve my sanity.)