Unfortunately have to agree. I really wanted to love HEY, and while it’s certainly not super laggy or anything, I’m not overwhelmed with the “magic”.
Ran into a host of inconsistencies already, changing between imbox/feed/papertrail on iOS also feels very “unnative” in the sense of not fluid.
The Basecamp folks have always been JavaScript skeptics (my perception at least) so I’m not totally surprised. And while the “magic” may apply to the simplicity of their front end implementation, that’s unfortunately not the same as a magical user experience where in 2020 I do expect a more fluid feel.
It’s quite apparent that often it’s just replacing one HTML block with another without too much thought about transitions.
I love the softwareleadweekly.com newsletter, the author also wrote a book called "Leading Snowflakes" which helped me when I first transitioned into a leadership role: http://leadingsnowflakes.com
It’s essentially a collection of books / podcasts / newsletters on modern technical leadership :)