Personally, I loved it... React + Redux + MUI = Winning (IMO)
A sentence written by someone who clearly hasn't worked on a large Angular 1.x project.
I've worked on 2x, if not 3x larger React codebase without these issues. I can't tell a single instance where language tooling was failing me so severely that I've contemplated turning it off because it's creating more uncertainty than its helping.
I'm relatively new to Angular 20 itself—only used Angular 1, and also migrated that project to React. So I'm not yet qualified to make big statements about it (but a preliminary gut feeling is that it often feels complex in the wrong places). C'est la vie though
* Two-way data binding spaghetti
* Boilerplate-heavy reactivity
* Opaque, framework-specific magic
* Manual state updates/transitions
React didn't win "by default" (whatever that means), it won because it was better than most of the other options at the time.
I agree that, on purely technical grounds, it isn't as strong of a framework as other competitors anymore, but React is and has always been Good Enough™ for most companies, to the point that it's not worth reaching for anything else most of the time. And I say this as someone who doesn't like most things about modern React.
Have you ever looked at the React source code…
React didn't win by default, it won because developers tried it and found it was better. It absolutely won on technical merit.
There's a bit of a question of whether React would still win on technical merit today, versus all the next-generation frameworks. I personally think it is still better than Svelte, Vue, etc, but I'm a bit of a React apologist.
Fun times.
That was in 2013. Angular 2 came out in 2016, and by that point React had won. Have had to dabble in other frameworks since then, and none of them seem to do anything significantly better than React. I spent my early career learning a new FE framework every year, at this point I'm happy to have something boring that does what I need and has a great ecosystem around it.
If a framework is easy to use and everyone knows it, it's simply the best choice for 90%+ of teams.
>“But proven at scale!” jQuery was proven at scale too. Past success doesn’t guarantee future relevance.
jQuery is still one of the most used front-end libraries, used on 80%+ of all websites. It's easy, it gets the job done, and a lot of sites don't require more than jQuery. jQueryUI can actually do a lot of stuff to build basic web applications. React and every other tech mentioned in the article is just too heavy for most website needs. When you need a build step, that increases the complexity and requirement for developer resources compared to something simple like jQuery, which is probably why jQuery still gets used so much.
Because it's just a library, not an opinionated framework, keeping everything consistent across a development team of varied tenure and experience levels will be a herculean effort.
…IOW not every app needs to be an SPA, but if it is, it’s still true that nobody needs most of it loaded at any given time. Give me my RAM back.
React is mostly HTML driven by data. "HTML killed front end innovation". Well that enabled standards to build real use cases on it with a common ground.
Before React, the Web world was a mess. In 2025, you have lots of frameworks to explore. React did not kill front end innovation at all, it just became a standard that gives more common understanding to building a website.
I wish! Mostly though, React is a terrible mess of hooks with weird rules, suspense, “use client”, pedantic docs, and millions of other idiosyncrasies that have no business being this mainstream.
I think most people agree that the core ideas are great. Eg composable components, props, unidirectional data flow etc. There’s a reason that all other reasonably popular frontend frameworks adopted these ideas. It’s great that React established them. It’s just a bit sad that React established them.
Are you referring to something in particular here? I've had my issues with the docs in the past, but I don't think I'd describe any of them being related to pedantry.
So eg when you want to focus an input, how do you do that? That's the input itself right, that's my core UI, that's not synchronizing, it's not an external system so I'm not supposed to use useEffect for that, right? That'd be bad, no?
Turns out I do need useEffect, and in fact it's the only way, barring using 3rd party hooks or components that, themselves, use useEffect for this. And the idea is (I assume?) that the DOM is the external system! This absolutely bonkers! The DOM is my app! That's not an external system at all. It's as non-external as things can get and I'm not synchronizing anything, I'm focusing an input.
This entire "external system" story isn't at all about what useEffect is, it's not what it does, it's merely what the React designers have decided you should use it for.
useEffect lets you run side effects. That's it, that's all there is to it. But they rewrote the docs with total beginners in mind, and put them so full of dos and donts that they forgot to explain what stuff actually does. Gaaah.
And half the documentation is like this. It dances around the actual behavior, never really explicitly saying what things do or how they work, with huge rants about what I ought to do and no info, except maaayybe hidden in some expando, about how things actually work and why.
> And the idea is (I assume?) that the DOM is the external system! This absolutely bonkers! The DOM is my app!
External systems usually means stuff like an event system, network requests, or something else not managed directly by React. Unless you're reaching outside the area of the DOM React is managing, you can usually do this in event handlers or (for spookier cases) ref callbacks. There are certainly exceptions, but it's often an architectural smell.
Further down in the docs you'll see[0]:
> Effects are an “escape hatch”: you use them when you need to “step outside React” and when there is no better built-in solution for your use case.
[0] https://react.dev/reference/react/useEffect#wrapping-effects...
The component render function is pure, meaning you can re-render component without unwanted side-effects. So on encountering an unresolved promise, halt and throw the promise, then have the runtime catch the promise and re-execute the render when it resolves. I thought this was really an elegant way to introduce an asynchronous dependencies.
This inverted behavior is the cause of most of the pain and footguns in React and React Hooks because the way state behaves in a React component is not the way state behaves in any other front-end JS one would normally write.
That's why I think for some folks who started with HTML + vanilla JS, React Hooks just feels wrong. It points the reactive callback to the component function whereas every other framework/library uses some sort of signal to point the reactive callback to a handler. Because React points the callback to the component function, then you have to be really cautious about where you put state inside of a component[0][1][2]
Even You wrote this about React's design choice which I think sums it up best:
> The pain and suffer[ing] of hooks all roots from the mismatch between a dogmatic belief in the superiority of immutability and the harsh reality of the host language that is JavaScript
- Vanilla: https://jsfiddle.net/qtmkbdo2/8/
- Vue: https://jsfiddle.net/vys2rmup
- React: https://jsfiddle.net/0gjckrae/1/
It should be obvious that Vanilla and Vue behave like how one would expect callbacks to work. React, because it points the callback to the component function, then requires that you be cognizant of state inside of the component function (placement, memoization, immutability, etc.). All of the pain of React is self-imposed from this design decision.
You can read more about it here: https://chrlschn.dev/blog/2025/01/the-inverted-reactivity-mo...
--
[0] https://adevnadia.medium.com/i-tried-react-compiler-today-an...
[1] https://tkdodo.eu/blog/the-useless-use-callback
[2] https://adevnadia.medium.com/react-re-renders-guide-why-reac...
So really, the key difference between React and Vue is that your function component is not the setup, it's the template.
It's a minimal, compilation-free JavaScript library that adds reactivity to native web components, as well as scoped styles and a few other ease-of-life features.
Is that not still considered reactivity? If so then I'll update the docs.
Mobile development forums were having all-out wars regarding MVP vs MVVM vs VIPER vs ... vs ... yadda yadda.
Now I can just enjoy stable predictable tooling and I can benefit from tons of examples and documentation.
One thing I like about React is that if you want it can be very simple.
This means that in theory the backend/runtime can be replaced (and was replaced ones from React to Preact (0.7.0 -> 0.8.0) then to use hooks and signals instead of class components (0.19.0 -> 0.20.0), and the code will remain the same.
This has one drawback which deters framework creators from choosing the language since there is no reason to innovate on something that is already "done", which leads to fewer people using it in general and hinders adoption, but I'm still optimistic.
It may be the default today, but it largely earned that position by being one of the better options out there. Today there's alternatives and even Angular still has a decent following, not that I'll touch it if I can avoid it.
edit: Just adding to the pain at the time... iirc Webpack + Babel + Sass + CSS + ReactTransforms each with wierd bespoke configuration options... Babel itself was a massive pain for even trying to limit to modern-ish targets or multi-target.
React itself was a bit awkward as well, a lot of the concepts themselves were difficult, and IMO, it didn't get much easier until functional components, even if that really complicated the library itself.
I still have mixed to poor feelings on Server Components as I think it's largely a waste for the types of things people typically build. HTMLX (speaking of innovation) is likely a better option in that space.
That said, I do like MUI (formerly Material-UI, a Material Design Implementation), I think the component architecture is really thoughtful and works well, biggest issue is that devs don't take the couple hours to read the docs and even have awareness of what's in that box.
I also like Redux and even hand-written reducers and extensions quite a bit.
In my experience React is rarely the best solution and adds a huge amount of complexity which is often completely unnecessary because React is rarely needed.
In the early days my very controversial view was that frontend developers tend to be fairly mediocre developers, and this is why a lot of frontend frameworks suck and frontend developers just mindlessly adopt whatever the hot new technology is with seemingly no concern for performance, maintainability, security, etc.
But honestly I'm not sure this explains it anymore... There are a lot of really talented frontend development teams out there working for companies with plenty of cash to try something different. I don't really understand why there's no serious competitor frameworks in terms of market share out there.
As far as I'm aware there's no analogies to this in other areas of the web tech stack. There's plenty of backend frameworks to pick from depending on the product. There's also plenty of competitive DBMSs, cloud providers, package managers, code editors, etc, etc. I don't understand why frontend development is so static in comparison because it's certainly not that React is the perfect solution for everything.
I can't speak to the complexity you've encountered, but for me it's pretty much zero. A button component is just a function. React-Router is good enough and code splitting is pretty much just changing how to import something. Component state is dead-easy to write by just adding a useState hook. Bundlers pretty much handle everything these days so not to much concern about size.
Your view on front-end developers having been mediocre in the past isn't far off though, at least in my experience. I noticed a big difference between the people who wanted to build nice looking pages and the ones that wanted to build applications myself. Even today it amazes me how many people have never unit tested their code, have no idea about layering an application and have poor JS/TS fundamentals. It's gotten a lot better though.
Ultimately it isn't perfect for everything, but for a lot of people it's an easy choice. And for me personally, the tons of other JS frameworks do very little in that area that I'd pick them. I'd rather spend my time working on the product. Lol, maybe its just the default because its the default at this point.
Honestly between React, Angular and Vue, there's enough jobs if you do want to specialise, but the mental model between the three isn't that different that a good engineer wouldn't be able to adapt.
React is boring old tech to me at this point and I'm happy with that. Like choosing Java, C# or Python for the back-end. I'd rather focus on innovating my clients products until something earth shattering comes along.
There are a lot of valid criticisms of React, but I don't think this is one of them. These problems are not really new with hooks. They're actually problems which existed in some form in the class component API. Taking them one at a time:
Dependency arrays: I cannot count the number of bugs I encountered which were due to a lifecycle containing some code which was supposed to be called when certain props or bits of state changed, but completely forgot to check one of them.
Stale closures: the second argument to setState allowed this exact bug. Also, people would bind methods in incorrect spots (such as in lifecycle methods) which has the same result.
Misused effects: at varying point, class components had access to the class constructor and the lifecycle methods componentWillMount, componentDidMount, componentWillReceiveProps, shouldComponentUpdate, componentWillUpdate, componentDidUpdate, componentWillUnmount (this is from memory and is definitely only partially complete). Misuse of these was incredibly common. An article like "You Might Not Need an Effect" but titled "You Might Not Need Lifecycle Methods" or "You Might Not Need the Second Parameter to setState" would have been very helpful in the past.
Hooks reduced the number of opportunities for making mistakes, make enumerating those opportunities easier, and, critically, made them easier to detect and warn users about.
All in all, this story has played out many times before, and will again. I think you either have adoption or you have a modern solution without technical debt. React had constraints that don't exist anymore that shaped its architecture, and now it has an enormous community that cannot turn on a dime.
Svelte, Solid, and Qwik have the benefit of hindsight and browser advancements. In 10 to 15 years time we'll be talking about a new batch of frameworks that have the same advantages over Svelte/Solid/Qwik.
Front end engineering has been a perpetual chase for The Shiny Thing™, constantly changing, with good excuses, but way too often throwing everything away and starting from scratch, forcing a perpetual catch up and periodic rewrites of everything.
Some maturity and a slower pace of change could be a good thing.
I mean, innovation is still happening, but it's not compelling enough to drop React for most apparently (at least not yet).
Performance is one thing (the internet is getting slower! Impressively bad!), but also webapps are becoming so incredibly overdesigned, at the expense of the user experience.
Before we had the discrete fields of front-end engineering, design, UX, etc web design was inherently limited and we used standardized shorthands for everything across the industry. With React it's so easy to throw out best practices and try to redesign every single experience from scratch. Combine that with the Figma-fication of web design and teams can get lost making pixel perfect designs that are usability nightmares.
Let's be honest - what percentage of modern React websites actually provide a better user experience than Craigslist? It's fast, I'm not dealing with buttons that move around as a page loads, unusual text sizes at non-standard screen sizes, etc. (The famous McMaster-Carr website is another example).
While the VDOM overhead does exist, it's not the performance bottleneck. More likely reasons are waterfall fetching (present in all frameworks and solvable by React Server Components) or excessive revalidation (solved by the compiler)
Huh, I wish. This is loosely related, but early in my career I worked in a company where one of the projects I was involved in was a relatively large-scale web platform. The system had quite a lot of interactive UI elements, but for some reason we weren't allowed to use any off-the-shelf UI library/framework like React (it was already around for quite some time), despite presenting arguments countless times on why it would be the better solution and save a huge amount of time.
Instead, we had to use a buggy and incomplete UI library that was built within the company, and the results were as you'd expect. Making changes to the UI was agonizing, the library's behavior and API was inconsistent, components were difficult to reuse, and you had to jump through hoops and monkey-patched nonsense to update the UI. On top of that, nobody worked on fixing the library itself, and eventually the system using it grew so large that making any fixes to the library would break the system and would need a massive amount of time to fix or rewrite all the broken components. The saddest thing was that the UI library itself did not actually do anything "innovative", just some things that are available in countless other UI libraries, but worse.
Sure, maybe it was my technical incompetence and poor decisions, but on the other hand, even then, I knew JS/TS quite well and wasn't one of those people who swear by a particular framework and know nothing else. I worked on other web-based projects before with various technologies and never had that many problems.
duxup•1h ago
Otherwise the front end land is still very dynamic and so on, I think it's great, there are lots of options.
If some boring insurance company doesn't pick the coolest new framework and picks react instead. I don't think that's a problem. Gotta go be with the cool kids to do the cool new things.
chairmansteve•1h ago
appreciatorBus•1h ago
efnx•1h ago