You might not need a service worker

The article argues that service workers are often unnecessary for their commonly cited use cases. The author examines specific examples like Slack's caching strategy, asset management across deploys, and manifest rewriting, demonstrating that simpler alternatives—such as HTTP caching with content hashing, keeping static assets in storage buckets, or handling logic server-side—can achieve the same results without service workers' complexity and risks. The piece suggests developers should carefully evaluate whether they actually need offline support or network-free functionality before implementing a service worker.