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johnnycerberus

> React was popular

By any metric, React is by far the most popular framework in 2021. It has even surpassed jQuery. [1][2]

[1] https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2021#section-most-...

[2] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=react,an...

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React isn't a framework. A more appropriate comparison would be Angular vs Next.js:

https://www.npmtrends.com/@angular/core-vs-next

But yeah, I wasn't trying to reply that React isn't still popular.

I don’t think the distinction between framework and library matters that much. People choose between react or angular (or others).

That sounds reasonable, but the comparison becomes an issue if there are vastly more people using React for small hobby projects that aren't meant to be businesses, or for things that aren't even web apps.

Why would that matter?

We are getting into nerdy arguments. React is by far a framework, as every library that you use will be highly influenced by its constructs and rendering engine, be it React Router, Redux, or others from the Hooks ecosystem. Many say it is just a library, but in practice, when trying to bring JS vanilla libraries, there's always that edge case where it conflicts with the virtual DOM.

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