App-ifying articles is an unfortunate path many sites have gone down. Islands of interactivity are great for special cases (games, some charts), but delivering a few KB of text via an application framework is overkill.
Seems like they need to do this for the paywalls.
As a dev that has never worked with react its, interesting, to see react '18' introducing fixes to problems that have not been issues before. I've used angular, straight SSR from PHP / node.js / .net and never suffered from 'screen jank' or huge culumative layout shift issues. Not sure we should celebrate the fixing of issues that shouldn't have ever been a problem for a site that just renders text and images.
I am currently solving large cumulative layout shift on a WordPress site of my friend... I really don't think these problems are reserved to React.
Most (if not all) blocks in Gutenberg are react in WP
It's not React, it's a jQuery mess from some low budget agency.
I wish they'd consider adding lighter pages. Compare the load time of a NYT page [1] to a text NPR page [2]. I'm seeing 5.5 seconds vs 600 ms. I think the latter is easier to read as well.