> some users have suggested pretty smart features that i've since implemented, like this back-to-top button to quickly get back to the top of the page
To me all position:fixed elements (headers, footers, this back-to-top button, etc) feel like a kind of annoying dirt on the screen. Their absence is a big part of why I love the web 1.0 aesthetic.
My god yes. There is literally a key on a full keyboard dedicated to this function (Home), smaller keyboards have a chord for it (like Fn-Up), and "mobile" touchscreen UI has a global mechanism for this (on iOS: touching the status bar)... to plop down a position:fixed button on top of the content to make it even easier to access this feature that is already extremely easy to access is just gratuitous.
Android doesn’t have this, and I missed it at first as well, but the scroll acceleration is so fast (much faster than on iOS) that you can nevertheless scroll to the top very quickly.
Wikipedia does this now, and I find it annoying, in particular the changing “current section” highlighting, and the fact that it hides when the browser window is a bit narrower. I’d rather press Home to get to the TOC again when it scrolled off.
Personally I don’t think it’s worth the benefits over just having a TOC at the top of the page, as is otherwise customary. It’s different if this is a web site or web app where you have an account, and where users can permanently enable/disable it as an option when they prefer it. But on a public web page for a general audience, it always introduces friction by being visually distracting (because it doesn‘t scroll with the rest of the page), or by hiding due to responsive layout (requiring the browser width to be adjusted, or having to toggle it by mouse instead of scrolling to the top by keyboard), and so on.
To me all position:fixed elements (headers, footers, this back-to-top button, etc) feel like a kind of annoying dirt on the screen. Their absence is a big part of why I love the web 1.0 aesthetic.