The degraded state is the design

Every project with a heavy visual layer accumulates a set of visitors it was not built for: the one who asked their operating system for reduced motion, the one on a machine with no WebGL2, the one whose corporate proxy dropped the bundle.

The temptation is to treat these as failure modes and to make the fallback merely functional. It is the wrong instinct, and it is visible: a page that has clearly had its good version removed reads worse than a page that never had one.

So the settled state gets designed. On this site the particle field renders ninety frames and stops, which produces a composed still rather than an empty canvas. Nothing is hidden by a script that might not run. If the enhancement never arrives, what is left is a complete page — not the ruins of a better one.