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Comment by freedomben | Hacker News Reader

better experience for who? For the developer it's a way better experience. For the consumer it often isn't because of inefficient bloat, but if effort is put into packaging it sensibly it can be better thanks to build pipelines/optimizations. In my experience, there's a lot of apps that would have never gotten written in the first place without the boost from React/Angular/etc. It simply takes way longer (which means also more expensive) to use "pure javascript and ajax."

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I've been doing FE development on and off since IE5/6, starting out with pure JS and Ajax, and in my opinion the modern FE developer experience using the major frameworks is a generational improvement over the messes we used to write. There are still frustrations, but it's a lot better than it used to be.

Browser API's and CSS have all improved drastically since then, so pure JS and Ajax isn't as bad. I still avoid frameworks for small things just to keep pages lightweight. But for heavyweight projects, if you don't use an established framework, you just end up with a shitty home-grown framework anyway, because the alternative, teams of developers working on the same site with no frameworks, is even worse.

Agree completely. I'm amazed at how good pure JS is these days. I only use React when I have a non-trivial UI that I need to write. It's just not worth it for simple stuff. That said I don't do a ton of FE work these days, so my opinion is less relevant.

For a certain kind of developer who drinks a certain kind of Kool-Aid, sure. Personally I am a lot less productive when I’m forced to work on a React codebase. It’s kind of like using an ORM, it can feel like it makes things easier, but really you end up fighting with the abstraction more than if you had just learned the underlying technology itself.

The thing is, every place I've worked that was against ORMs or frontend frameworks wound up evolving their own half-documented, half working framework. I find it's easier to spend as much time learning the abstraction as the underlying technology, and then that knowledge can be ported from system to system.

My experience too. The whole "we don't use a framework" sounds great but it always turns in to some sort of home grown framework that is poorly documented, has bugs, and isn't open source so you can't take it with you when you leave.

Related: "I don't watch or even own a TV" [watches Netflix/YouTube on a laptop six hours a day]

You also miss out on the community aspect of things. Working with a framework like React means that there is a worldwide community of developers that you can tap into when you run into a roadblock.

It is incredibly frustrating to run into an issue with a home grown framework and have to ask around only to discover that the person who wrote the part you're having trouble with left the company 2 years ago and no one else understands it.

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