The problem, from what I saw was nested forms and trying to hold state on the client when the server should have been asked for the state. This lead to template duplication and trying to hold too much state on the client.
I jest; our first geocities page was just HTML with maybe a visitor counter, marquee and whatnot.
Our first PHP application / project in school actually didn't use JS yet, it used frames for a static menu and header and just straight form submission to get data to the back-end. Those were the days.
But when I did my first college level internship (1 year of internships is part of college education over here), it was Java back-end, JSX templates for the presentation part, and it was enriched with PrototypeJS for things like dialogs and an animated accordeon (back when animation was still "update the height of this element a couple times a second").
My first job involved using a lot of JS to still enhance a page; add to cart, image carousels, that kinda thing. jQuery era.
And my next job involved building a user interface for customer support staff to look into SAP or something like that, poorly built in BackboneJS.
The next assignment was once again using BackboneJS to rebuild the investment banking front-end for customers. That was - as with most applications I've built btw - a great use case for single-page applications (as they were called then). No SEO needed, fast enough to render purely front-end, API heavy (that was also the time when people realized you could build one API for both web and mobile), etc.
(I'm not gonna claim things were better back then.)
IMO web dev has never seen better tooling than today, and user experience has improved tremendously over the years.
What we used to call AJAX has grown from a neat side toy to a basic part of everyday life in the form of client components and SPAs. The server is still as powerful as ever if you want it to be. But having such awesome client-side power is nice for interactive apps like dashboards, maps, games, forums, office apps, online IDEs, etc. It enabled the wholesale migration of everyday apps from bespoke desktop apps for each OS to a universal platform across all laptops and desktops.
All that power of course required more complexity. It's very different trying to write a blog or landing page in HTML/CSS vs trying to write a whole web app. Angular and React were invented to help develop apps that were several times more complex than their precesssors, at a time when JS runtimes (and the language itself) were still really primitive compared to the server side languages of the time.
Yeah, there was a really painful period there in the late 2010s where different JS frameworks each solved a tiny part of the problem. These days it's less of an issue. Next won, became the default, and deservedly so. It's really good, and has an appropriate level of abstraction for mid complexity apps, and allows a good mix of server-side rendering and client-side pages. Adding React Server Components makes that division a cleaner first class citizen.
That only makes sense at a certain complexity though. If you don't need it, don't use it. If you're making a largely static blog or documentation site, there are simpler architectures. You can still use HTML and sprinkle in a few lines of JS as needed. You can still use WordPress or Wix for most small business needs.
But if you're building more complex apps, god, React is an absolute dream compared to trying to round-trip every minor interaction to the server for recomputing the UI and sending over an entire HTML page every time, losing context and page position and half filled forms and whatever. It also encouraged the use of form data as state, and work was often lost on an accidental back button or the frequent server crashes before the advent of trivial cloud scaling.
IMO it's only overengineered when misapplied. Some of these tools are really useful, even essential, in the proper use cases. Maybe the sad part is that we overteach them and encourage their use even when they're not necessary (or perhaps counterproductive). Right tool for the job and all that.
Edit: not really pitching React over Vue or Svelte or HTMX or whatever, just that client-side complexity has its uses. Pros and cons, not strictly better or worse.
I have yet to see a React project with more than five contributors fail to turn into a big ball of mud within 18-24 months, requiring either a periodic rewrite or resigned acceptance of trudging through large volumes of mud to get anything done.
(Genuine question, not being snarky)
I haven't tried modern Angular in a while. But Next.js reminds me of a lot of the things I loved about early Angular and disliked about raw React (which always was more of a UI lib than a proper framework). Have you tried comparing them in particular?
I haven't tried Next.js myself though a coworker was playing with it recently. The amount of components available for React, especially the for-pay libraries, can really decrease time to release. But it's still React. Builds a little slower than Angular 16 at this point, but it's fairly close. You still need to keep a firm hand on the codebase when working on a team to prevent code enmuddification, though less so than plain React. React's (what I consider) extreme amounts of boilerplate for doing anything of consequence is still there though. I also personally prefer Angular's service injection patterns over Reacts explicit imports everywhere.
I'd give them both up in a heartbeat for SvelteKit if I could make a business case for either rewrites or new projects. As it stands, Angular is really good enough and fights code entropy well enough that there isn't a business case there yet.
Not my experience at all, and I've been working with React for years. I've seen companies successfully transition to functional components from class components, all while maintaining years-long functionality. Just because you dislike React doesn't mean it's not successful.
I am glad you are an experienced React developer. React needs more of you, because the vast majority aren't.
That said, I have little doubt your and your team's experience could implement with most other frameworks as well—frameworks with a shallower learning curve, just as much power, greater performance before reaching for useMemo(…) equivalents, and far far less boilerplate code.
But 100% correct: I dislike React.
Now if there were a performant version of the core React philosophy like Preact is (or React with their upcoming Forget compiler) I'll gladly take it, but it seems that frontend libraries these days are trending in the wrong direction.
As far as I know, it's not possible to do client-side rerendering without Javascript.
Many frameworks these days do a hybrid approach of server and client-side rendering, sometimes with rehydration, sometimes not. But my understanding is that they all require some level of Javascript to redraw UIs on the client.
If I'm misunderstanding (or just plain wrong?), could you please elaborate?