jwinterm 887b59629d feat(splash): the pillar signature, and no more flash on refresh ...

Two separate problems, one of them a real bug.

THE FLASH. The splash is server-rendered, so on a refresh the browser painted
it and only then did hydration read sessionStorage, decide this visitor had
already entered, and remove it. That one painted frame is the flash, and React
cannot prevent it: even useLayoutEffect runs after the server HTML is painted.

So the decision moved before paint. A tiny synchronous script in <head> reads
the session flag and prefers-reduced-motion and stamps the root element; a
plain CSS rule hides the overlay in the frame it would otherwise appear in.
The overlay is `fixed`, so hiding it shifts no layout. Verified with a
Playwright run: after reload the root is already stamped at readyState
"interactive", the overlay computes to display:none, and the splash is not
visible in any of twelve sampled frames.

THE SPLASH ITSELF. It is now only the pillar signature: four dots become the
four pillar symbols -- commerce, crypto, games, education -- become the word
SUCH, then the page takes over. One generated asset (morph_splash*.svg) whose
CSS timeline is scaled to land exactly on 1337ms, from such-graphics 628fcc1.
SPLASH_MS here and motion.splash.ms there are the same number by construction:
a gate that closes early cuts the last letter mid-draw.

Everything else on the splash is gone -- tagline, supporting line, the four
corner nav links, the chevron, the water-refraction filter and its pre-warm.
The corner links were unreachable inside a gate this short anyway, and the
header carries them. splash-logo-data.ts goes with them, now orphaned.

Perf, measured on a local production build: mobile 97, desktop 98, unchanged
from what production scores today. CLS stays ~0. LCP moves 0.9s -> 1.2s on
mobile, because the mark is now a 12KB request where the old logo was an
inlined data URI. Both theme variants are fetched (3.7KB each gzipped) since
`dark:hidden` hides but does not prevent the download, so half of that is
waste. Fixable by inlining as data URIs the way splash-logo-data.ts did, at
the cost of ~30KB in the bundle; not done here because the score did not move.

2026-08-17 12:11:36 -04:00

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