Not even a day after the post about HTMX not living up to its promise! There are only two certainties in life, death and frontend churn.
Frontend churn hasn't been as much of a thing for years now, see e.g. https://2022.stateofjs.com/en-US/libraries/front-end-framewo.... If you stuck with Angular or React 10 years ago, you're still good today. jQuery is even older but still on 75% of websites (https://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/javascript_library), and Bootstrap is on nearly a quarter.
Frontend churn is only a thing if you try to stay on the left side of the Gartner Hype Cycle.
- the move from in-browser JSX compilation to build tools / webpack
- the move from class components to functional components and hooks
- all the changes related to ES6 classes and modules + build system
- server-side components
- Flux -> Redux
- Redux -> MobX -> Relay -> Redux Toolkit -> Context API -> Zustand / Jotai / Recoil -> react-query (next: zero?)
- Next.js and Remix, 7 react-router versions (latest with major breaking API changes again)
- Signals and more SSR stuff (I stopped looking at this point)
And this is ignoring all the React Native churn over the years as I imagine not everyone is involved with that.
Even if your particular project didn’t go through all of these migrations, you had to relearn things to be able to work in other/newer projects.
It’s impossible to measure, but having written and used a ton of different frameworks, I really do feel like the overhead of keeping up with the changes was equal to or larger than learning a new one every couple years.
React Router changing its API so often felt unnecessary too.
I wouldn't call all of that churn though, as I believe most devs only had to deal with a subset of those. Some who got into React in 2019 could be writing the same kind of code today.
Frontend as whole, on the other hand...
Besides that, React churn isn't too bad. I have to fix builds, but I don't have to relearn everything about React. Unlike Angular.
You read that wrong.