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Comment by ricardobeat | Hacker News Reader

> they always devolve into these blobs of non-deterministic async state with unpredictable performance

Exact same experience here. I've been banging this drum for years. When hooks came around I thought they might make it better, but alas, we are still in a downwards spiral. Building web apps is 10x more complicated today than it was ten years ago, with nothing to show for it.

I'm happy to see some known voices in the community realizing this, but also sad that this is how things work now. The rise and fall of React will have been both a product of social media / developer celebrities.

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Building web apps with React is just much faster than doing it without, even when using Angular complex apps will always be complex.

You can’t have an easy solution when you have tons of interaction and state.

What else have you personally had experience with? Angular would not be in my list of better alternatives.

My comparison is always with Svelte / Vue, and also what we had in previous eras (Backbone, Knockout, etc). HTMx is picking up steam too. We used to push out interactive UI in days/weeks, and mind you, in the past websites did not look all the same. There were no component libraries to start from. Today it seems most React projects are planned in months/quarters despite being built atop a mountain of third-party code, all meant to 'speed things up'.

What we do today is not faster at all, too much time is wasted on tooling and issues that arise from React's architecture (hooks, ssr, data loading, error handling, async issues, black-box performance issues, dependency hell).

SSR issues and dependency hell are not unique to React.

I started a new React project back in December after being annoyed with Angular, just to see whether it would be any less annoying and/or quicker.

It's been neither of those things and I'm actually beginning to regret making that choice.

The learning curve is steep for React, you’ll struggle without solid JS skills

You'll also struggle with solid JS skills - even the best FE devs I know, working for top tech companies, are able to produce React spaghetti.

> You can’t have an easy solution when you have tons of interaction and state.

Desktop software was never this fragile.

Fragile in what way, please specify

Some big apps are actually unusable slow for me on crazy fast hardware, I'm talking typing on textboxes not having good fps on Facebook... Fml

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