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I recommend avoiding React. I have never seen an ecosystem so bogged down at every turn.

It's perfectly possible to just use React on its own, without getting bogged down with all the other buzzword-of-the-week stuff around it.

React itself has been reasonably stable for a long time in Web terms. It is much more tightly scoped and smaller in its interface than most JS frameworks. There are a couple of major design trade-offs, which often seem to get overlooked in React advocacy, but if you have a bit of experience using it and understand the practical pros and cons then you can quickly decide whether the balance is favourable for some new project.

People who work in React spend way more time fixing toolchain stuff and trying to mix 10 artisanal-crafted "easy to reason about" libraries in order to accomplish tasks which are either solved or not even issues in other component frameworks.

Some people who work with React might. Plenty of others don't.

React is great. But the tooling around it tends to complicate things a lot. Just for example react-redux (not just redux).

When I first started with React, it felt awesome - just React still feels great. But I had just started then and then got introduced to redux (I had been using something similar custom built). That was good too, until I learnt react-redux. I get the concepts, I understand every bit of it and have used it correctly in many large apps - it is useful. But react-redux just feels awkward many times and I consistently feel something is wrong with it - but I don't know what. React-Redux just feels disconnected with the idea of independent web-components.

On a side note - If one is okay moving to Typescript, Angular2 is just amazing.

I find the Redux ecosystem to be one of those areas that sounds great in theory, but that in practice has quite a narrow range where it's a good fit. If the web app's data model is simple enough, it can easily keep track of mutable state directly and just rerender everything on any relevant change with acceptable performance. If the model is complicated enough, the simple data stores provided by Redux and the like lack power and flexibility until you build a lot of other architecture around them, at which point you might well be better off building something catering to your project's exact needs anyway. I can see that there might be a happy zone somewhere in between, where building with tools like Redux and its surrounding ecosystem does pay off, but I've yet to work on such a project myself.

Would you like to try Respo https://github.com/respo-mvc/respo/wiki/Quick-Start if you hold similar options with me? I built Respo because I think React is not functional enough.

Polymer while I used to like it more isn't better than Web Components and for me was harder to use than both React and Web Components. React offers up more than both Polymer and Web Components spec. With web components it's still just a glop of JavaScript in a file. So I don't quite see the benefit of being "closer to the metal" when you are not closer to the metal. The community simply hasn't embraced Polymer. React is easy for me to understand and I can use it today and Web Components aren't really a necessity at that point nor are they even supported in browsers yet.

I frankly don't see how you could come to the conclusion that Angular 2 components are simpler than React components. I mean, in React, a component can be as simple as const MyComponent = () => <span> some markup nonsense </span>;

Yup that's the argument mentioned: React is "simpler", "anyone can see"...

Brevity isn't simplicity. The simplicity is being easier to install, build, read about, debug, consume APIs with, send data between, talk about to other developers... and yes, "reason" about.

    myMod.component('Foo', {
      template: '<h1>{{$and.better.templating}} {{see()}}</h1>',
      controller: function() {
        var and = {this_one: 'does_stuff'};
      }
    });

This is not easier to reason about than returning jsx IMO... It's only 1 of the ways to build an angular 2 component. The website tutorial is using decorator syntax. Typescript Angular 2 documentation. What's wrong with just learning JavaScript and less Angular specific syntax and tooling.

Maybe I'm wrong but I feel like Angular likes to force projects to become big monoliths where people who don't understand the problem being solved are trying to architect a solution for all of the problems.

React does have jsx shock and JavaScript tooling fatigue. However, now that React is mature JavaScript tooling decision fatigue should be less of an issue. You aren't relying on one company to solve problems. You have a community solving problems for themselves. As they need it they can add it or take it away.

Why aren't you just using an interpolated string?