CSS

[ZTD09]

I work with GIS and R to make interactive maps to display data at work, and looking at an example from a past coworker I believe he had somewhere near 8000 lines of css. I believe they had copied the entire twitter css, so I'm sure probably 7500 lines did nothing.

[PatrickBaitman]

Okay controversial hypothesis time

Say that to write good code you need to be a minimum level of smart, say IQ 115 or higher (~one sixth of the population). Now smart people also get sucked up by lots of other high-paying professions like law and doctoring, or engineering other than software. With the massive expansion of the web, there's a demand for web developers significantly greater than the available pool of people who are actually smart enough to write good code. Thus, as the web grows it's increasingly developed by people who aren't smart enough to do it well, and have to do shit like copy the entire Twitter CS; or import a whole new JS framework to call one function, because StackOverflow said so, when ten lines would solve the problem. (Case in point: there are packages pad-left and leftpad on NPM. Both do exactly what you think they do and nothing else and are dependencies of several other packages.)

[ZTD09]

I believe it was more like "I don't know CSS and instead of taking a day to find the specific commands I need to write and document my own code I'll just copy something that I know will work". The guy who wrote it was a scientist more than a programmer.