I’m trying to think about what the authors unspoken “better approach” could’ve been, because I’m with you—that doesn’t strike me as remarkable at all, it seems like it’s the way things have always been.
Maybe they were trying to argue that for something as simple as that, it could’ve been a div with a background and a font icon, and used CSS to make the div into a circle, and rotate that? It certainly seems more complicated at a glance, but I’m not a frontend dev, so, who knows?
I kept reading it expecting something to jump out at me. He just goes on about how “a square cannot be rotated”.
This honestly feels like more of a chrome bug or more likely some really weird settings on behalf of the author. I’ve seen this exact approach on the web. Nothing struck me as odd.
What is odd is that he didn’t do any testing with a different browser, machine, or OS even. He just decided to make a blog post.
Maybe they were trying to argue that for something as simple as that, it could’ve been a div with a background and a font icon, and used CSS to make the div into a circle, and rotate that? It certainly seems more complicated at a glance, but I’m not a frontend dev, so, who knows?