To me it seems just like wasting money instead of using the same money to produce business value.
Apparently some developers cannot do math, salary-per-hour * effort-spent.
Apparently some developers cannot do math, salary-per-hour * effort-spent.
What would be the monetary cost of such decision versus the monetary cost of the one taken?
Which approach would achieve the same value of 20 percent improvement in perf and engagement with lower amount of money being spent?
As someone who used to work on large Backbone apps I agree that it's a huge drain on developer productivity -- hard to add features, hard to test, lack of standards, etc. Not to mention the recruiting problem: I would never accept a job offer to work on a Backbone app again.
In addition, it becomes harder to hire if the technology is too far behind. It often is an indicator that the company doesn't invest enough into engineering because they let their state fall into not up to date codebases. This results in vastly increased recruiting costs, time lost, and decreased quality of life for those who stay.
It's not as simple as a direct calculation. It's very misleading to assume that one can simply shift resources into product feature development and not necessarily incur tradeoffs.
I don't think Vue will replace React for this reason (it's much closer to old DOM-munging style) but if something does its much less of a big deal than going from Backbone->React.