It is always a horrible decision and often driven by an incompetent management not to go native. If I'd ask my aces to use react, I am pretty sure at least one would puke over the desk, another one would jump out of the fifth floor and the rest would simply decline and start question my competencies. (I know you'd puke Felix!)

On the other hand we're earning a lot due to all the unnecessary and wasted resources we have to sell to meet performance expectations of our customers ( and those guys happily buy it ) you could reach with 1/1000 probably 1/100000 of the MIPs by utilizing native C.

Utilizing react is not even programming or engineering. That's assembling. rant off

> It worked pretty well until a major OS decided "nah, not gonna happen here".

No, it really didn't. For a time after "Java Web Start" was introduced in 2001, java had (has) a pretty decent story for distributing application (big run time dependency, problematic java updater non withstanding).

But I think the biggest problem java had/has is the mix of java being a hopelessly verbose, and arguably rather primitive language that's a bad fit for both AWT and (to a lesser degree) Swing. It's almost comical to contrast "hello world" with swing/java and with swing/jython (or jruby) - it's not that the UI toolkit is unusable, but it's not a good fit for the biggest use-case: simple business applications.

I should add that I think kotlin looks like a pretty perfect match for "the good parts of java without any added complexity".

> What's different this time?

Modern JS is arguably a better fit for simple GUI programming than modern java is.