kill-sticky | remove sticky elements and restore scrolling | Web Framework library

We all know that modern web browsing is extremely painful. See this screenshot of the BBC's website for example:

On some screens, the actual content here wouldn't even make the first page. It gets even worse when you add fixed footers with advertisements or "We've updated our Terms of Service" messages. And don't even mention overlays. On any given day, one has to dismiss, accept, or reject hundreds of generic web messages, or be consigned to reading their web content from within a narrow field of view that is a fraction the height of their screen.

Fortunately, being a tech savvy web user, I am aware that browser extensions exist that can hide all fixed-elements on any given page and I make liberal use of these both on desktop and mobile. (Here is the one I use, but there are many others.)

This may work by the mere chance that they are uncommon. If, for example, everyone started using them then surely all the folks that put those headers and footers there in the first place would be really annoyed and find a way to work around them. This could be the reason why you don't see any browsers adopting this as a built-in functionality, despite the problem (and solution!) being around for years.

As a backend engineer I don't have a lot of experience in frontend to answer this myself. But one of the original propagators of this technique is Alisdair McDiarmid's post from 2013 where he explains how it works based on this snippet: