CL uses some traditional design principles: notice it's divided into three columns, and the center column is subdivided into three columns.
I appreciated its commitment to lack of ornamentation and density of information, but fine design can be pleasing too. The worst of both worlds is probably something like Amazon or the backend Wordpress Dashboard. Wikipedia is slightly better than average.
The reigning monarchs of javascript overload were, for more than a decade, newspaper sites. Often the js bandwidth was greater than the image loads, due to multiple ad networks. (I'm no longer on dialup so not so sensitive to it, not checking the network traffic.) It's ironic, since printed newspapers evolved to follow pretty strict design standards. In mathematical science publishing, you start to appreciate the traditions of typography: every kern has to be right or it looks wrong. But newspapers learned to do completely without bold or italics. Many have degraded in design now, excluding the top few.
Another advantage of CL design is that it is unique and distinctive, at this point.
As long as it can handle unicode, it's fit to purpose (hint). And the editor works well (contra Reddit).