As a fellow 37 year old, I had a realization yesterday after a prolonged debate about HTMX vs React. For context: I’m a long time React fan, think htmx is neat, and remember all the reasons why HTML-over-Ajax didn’t catch on in the 2007 web development era. Been a primarily web guy since 2003 or so.

The problem with React (and friends) isn’t React (and friends), it’s react developers. People who aren’t web developers first and react users second.

I have interviewed (and worked with) so many frontend engineers with years of experience whose minds were completely blown by the idea of using a form submit event to handle form submission. Or my biggest pet peeve – button + onclick to change location.href instead of just making a link. Argh.

So yeah I think we’re lucky to have grown up with this stuff and seen it evolve over time. Many folks these days come to the field backwards and miss a lot of the good stuff that’s available to them.