what's hardly ever mentioned is how great hotwire is. it takes time getting used to, documentation is sparse but oh man oh man - hotwire is nice. you get to skip a majority of spa shenanigans.
One of my colleagues recently switched from mostly react to default full stack Rails. He was really struggling with how to filter things in a table. When I showed him how I would do it, his comment was along the lines of: “I can’t believe how simple this is. Modern JS just doesn’t work this simple any more. This is like how jquery used to work but way more organized”.
I can’t say I know enough about modern js development to validate that comment. He noted something about expectations of how the dom managing things…
So, if you’re coming with a certain mindset of how to do things, try to leave that behind a moment and read through the handbook. Especially if it involves making fetch requests to do things. That’s like, the number one “you probably shouldn’t do it like that” in Hotwire.
then this series on youtube - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7dx1Yt3FzU&list=PLm8ctt9NhM...
some things have changed a bit - so you just have to work through the kinks.
one other thing though - since railsword conf - there was an announcement that certain things have simplified but I haven't found the docs or the new simplified api's.
I don’t know if that’s helpful, but realizing that I needed to shift from thinking about components to pages was the a-ha when Hotwire all started making sense.