This hack is supposed to be for huge data: 10kb or more, thus comfortably more than a page. If the >10kb wall o' code was wrapped in a parse-as-JSON-at-runtime function call which was was preceded by a three-line comment describing a quick and dirty benchmark showing that it saves a useful number of milliseconds on page load in a fairly typical use case, and if the web resource was intended to be loaded many millions of times, I would nod and approve when reviewing the code. The way the original objector writes, it sounds as though nothing would suffice to justify this hack, and certainly not a mere benchmark and 3 lines of comments preceding it. That attitude seems like unreasonable blinkered zealotry, or some other kind of tunnel vision, e.g. someone who has just never thought seriously about the appropriate tradeoffs in maintaining a web resource which gets loaded millions of times a month.