Find the technique, not the trend.

Four thousand ingots drawn in a single call, with the draw-call figure published next to the frame time so the cost of the scene is stated rather than implied.

A lightning bolt with no model file — a high-segment cylinder displaced along its own normals by 3D noise every frame, orbited by fourteen shards on an underdamped spring.

Publish the millisecond budget next to the work — a receipt that makes optimisation a claim you can audit.

A trident where a single transmission material at an index of refraction of 2.42 does all the work, backed by 400 instanced cavitation bubbles it exists to distort.

An object with no vertices — a signed distance field marched per pixel, with the step budget exposed so the exact moment quality is bought back is visible.

Level-of-detail that drops populations and post, not meaning — a degradation path you can defend on a phone.

One honest global switch — system preference plus user override — that every animation layer already reads.

Arm a GPU stage only when it enters the viewport, and drive a single uniform from scroll velocity — never from a second RAF.

Parallax depth without a renderer — stacked planes, scroll velocity, and grain that still reads when WebGL never arms.

Four translucent planes at different parallax depths producing depth with no canvas, no shader, and no main-thread cost.