The author also did a great job of building a game that scales. No server, everything is in a very small amount of HTML and JavaScript, easily cached. He can have the world play with no ads at very low cost. Of course, this means people can easily cheat, but where's the fun in that?
It also demonstrates how easy it is to ruin things by caring about monetizing them. A lot of what's great about it wouldn't really be possible if you cared about making money off it.
all the Wordle dev would have to add is a single link to a place to donate. He would make a fair amount given it's current popularity. But I agree with your point.
Without diminishing any accolades to the author, this is exactly how I would design the game - and the most sensible approach. It's the bulk of the web that is shit these days, and the low expectations and surprise I see expressed is a testament to how bad things have gotten.
I think it would be possible to build an even faster, more robust solution with plain HTML, CSS and a Rails / PHP server on the backend. The less propagation of JavaScript, the better.
Rails and PHP would be the last thing on my mind when scaling a project like this one. Worldle only has to serve a bunch of static files to clients (the exact same files to everyone). How would this be improved by having back and forth with a server to play the game?
