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Comment by ht85 | Hacker News Reader

Another thing is that almost every complaint I see about React (except bundle size maybe, but who cares?) exists in the APP context.

If your use case is a simple website, React is just a nice templating lib and you won't need to use any of the things people generally dislike about it. That AND your experience when you inevitably have to add some interactivity is going to be 100x better than vanilla JS.

As for the build step, there are many turn key solutions nowadays that "just work". And isn't a small build step a plus, compared to being at the mercy of a typo breaking everything? To me that piece of mind if worth a lot, compared to whatever manual testing you'd have to do if you work with "text" files.

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> is just a nice templating lib

Are these templates only used on the server-side to generate the HTML upfront? Or is it being generated on the client?

> experience when you inevitably have to add some interactivity is going to be 100x better than vanilla JS

I don't believe this can quantified. How are you measuring DX improvements? Are you also able to continue to measure these improvements as your application/codebase scales?

It's certainly possible to generate the HTML up-front. Tooling like Next.js even sets things up so it's easier to render the HTML for the first page load on the server than to push it to the client.

I have a website. It's not great, it doesn't get much traffic, but it's mine :). If you disable JS, it works: links are links, HTML is loaded for each page view. If you enable JS, it still works: links will trigger a re-render, the address bar updates, all the nice "website" stuff.

If I write enough (and people read enough) then enabling JS also brings performance benefits: yes, you have to load ~100kB of JS. But each page load is 4kB smaller because it doesn't contain any boilerplate.

Obviously I could generate the HTML any way I choose, but doing it in React is nice and composable.

If you really want to, you can have a react app that is just static templates with no interactivity with a simple Node server that just called renderToString and all of a sudden react is just a backend templating framework. If you want to get really fancy you can then re-render specific components on the client side without re-rendering the entire page. You don't need NextJS to do this either, its very simple and straightforward and lets you use an entirely frontend toolchain to do everything.

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