React is winning by default and slowing innovation

and now it's failing for the same exact reason, a pseudo "just js function" dsl (hooks) and all the magics enabled by special "compilers" and toolchain.

React isn't Javascript. It's a franken-language that looks superficially like a mix of JavaScript and XML whilst following the rules of neither. That's why there is such a thing as a React compiler - a good sign that you're not writing JS, which doesn't have compilers.

The other hint should be all the new rules you have to follow. React is full of magic syntax that looks like functions, but e.g. you can't call them inside an if statement, or you have to redundantly declare the 'dependencies' (variables you read) and so on. The semantics of React code are very different to imperative straight line code.

(To get ahead of the common objection: of course it's still JavaScript by virtue of being implemented in JavaScript. But so are Svelte, Vue et all)

I'll likely NEVER use anything that doesn't let me run JSX.

My personal preference is for complexity at the start of the render pipeline (e.g. in state) or at the end (e.g, in JSX).

So I personally dislike complex hooks composition, but I can live with it. (My) teams seem to like it. I'd rather have boilerplate of redux, or redux sagas - or a S.O.L.I.D framework + scaffolding tools, and turn the composition of logic part of my brain off.

But the context switch to maintaining scaffolding tools is perhaps a bit of a jump.

As an aside: I'm shocked to see Yeoman largely diminished in activity, and Hygen (https://github.com/jondot/hygen) not getting anywhere near enough love as it deserves etc.

Perhaps there is some, first-class macro or meta programming or combination of the two that is missing. Or maybe its hard to invest in tools you can't necessarily take from job to job - as scaffolding tools are capturing opinion.

Also calling it "just JavaScript" might've been true in the Class component days, but in this frankenstein "functional" component paradigm we're at today it's far from the truth. I mean, it's not even a JS file, it's a JSX file for starters.

At the end of the day the whole JSX vs HTML-DSL thing comes down to a personal preference, and I doubt it's had much to contribute in terms of the success of the various frameworks. I know plenty of people working with React that despise JSX, and I know plenty of people working happily with Vue or Svelte that hate the DSL for templates.

<> // React code here <>

Except it's not. It has a bunch of footguns and implicit behaviours that make no sense unless you're well-versed in the internals of React.

See: https://macwright.com/2024/09/19/the-extra-rules-of-hooks

https://www.schiener.io/2024-03-03/react-closures

And JSX by itself is already a DSL, which drastically changes how it works based on the pragma used. JSX for SolidJS, Preact, Inferno or any other framework has completely different internals.

(Not saying React is bad, just that DSLs impeding adoption rings hollow in light of Tailwind/JSX.)

I agree with JSX, and function components are nice, but React is most definitely not just function composition. Hooks add state and introduce life cycle events that take components way beyond stateless territory, to the point that it would be far easier to reason about them if they were class components with properties and decorators and handlers invocable through inversion of control.

They each have their own quirks. Personally I'd rather write language specific if/else (obvious, can't get it wrong) than have to remember to reactify my functions if I want to avoid subtle performance issues.

I want to increment some counter on the webpage. Which approach feels natural?

  increment = () => {
    this.setState((prevState) => ({ count: prevState.count + 1 }));
  };

  const increment = () => setCount((count) => count + 1);

  function increment() {
    count += 1;
  }

No one writing markup says "Damn, I wish I could write this inline with my javascript." Have you even seen a react component before? People writing javascript containing the markup which, in turn, contains more inline javascript statements for conditional rendering. No logical person would argue "this is better than {#if}{:else}{/if}".

This might be just a rationalization. React might be "winning" (whatever that means), because it was the first proper component-based library, when its competitors (Backbone, Angular, Ember) were large, slow, and clumsy, and still struggling with the concept. Plus, developers back then were easily impressed by the word "Facebook", which meant a large tech company that probably knew what it was doing, and served as a guarantee of good quality. So it had a tremendous head start and good marketing. If Vue, Svelte, Solid, or Lit were there first, who knows if React would be "winning" now.

As long as you're not invoking a hook in those if/else blocks!

Furthermore, Web Components enforce good patterns; like the fact that you can only pass strings as attributes (by-value) is actually genius as it encourages simple, minimalist component interfaces and avoids pass-by-reference issues for which React community had to invent an entirely new paradigm to protect against (I.e. Redux state management with functional programming approach).

And the great irony is that a lot of the top people who are still pushing React are basically rich from Facebook shares and don't have to work anymore. In effect many of them are forcing this technology onto young people who have no choice in the matter whilst they themselves don't need to use it or do any coding anymore. Meanwhile I know a lot of developers who want to leave (or have left) the industry because of how bad it is and how few decisions they're allowed to make.

It's demoralizing to work with inferior tools when you know better tools exist because you use them in side projects... When you see this, you think to yourself "If the company forces me to be inefficient with my choice of tooling, this gives me a license to be inefficient in other ways."

Personally, I don't even code anymore (only on my side projects). It's a shame because one of my main talents is writing clean, minimalist code. In my day job, I'm using drag-and-drop UI platforms like n8n and Flowise (for AI). It's refreshing to be able to use vanilla JS inside the nodes, without a compile step and on a real-world project that actually pays. These UI platforms are actually much more predictable to work with than React. When I was using React (for almost a decade), I was constantly debugging weird glitches and state management issues; I never encountered those with Web Components or with platforms like n8n.

Web components are fantastic. They are the real future.

I avoid frameworks like a plague. Plain JS, web components and some good domain specific libs are more than enough to cover all my needs

I promise writing applications for the browsers is not challenging. You don’t need big frameworks or component madness that’s more of the same.

I've been using web components using a wrapper to avoid all boilerplate. It gets me 80% of web component functionality with very little effort: https://github.com/lelanthran/ZjsComponent

Discussed on HN previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44290315

Now this is not perfect, but there is, for me, no easier way to create and use new html components.

For example, a guy I know online who is an argumentative, boring backend dev that regularly has really bad and uninformed takes on things he has very limited experience with, he recently said he prefers web components. For all intents and purposes, he had ~0 web development experience.

And then we are not actually far from what we were always able to do with traditional templating engines, which already allow us to define separate reusable components. It is what they were made for. Full circle back, throw out all the JS frameworks.

For many use cases, there's not much difference between writing a Web component or an IIFE (Immediately Invoked Function Expression) that attaches your JS functionality to a div somewhere like we wrote JS without jQuery 15 years ago, although Web components are more elegant. But still, they are mostly packaging.

I say this as someone who likes Web components and who created several ones that are used in production. But just yesterday, when I added a new attribute to one of my Web components and wondered for a moment why the new attribute wouldn't get rendered, I realized that I forgot to add the code that imperatively tells the DOM how to update itself. Which is okay, because this is just a small component and it's pretty lightweight. I'd never use a framework for stuff that can be achieved without much effort in vanilla JS.

My point is: selling Web components as a way out of this trap is disingenuous. They don't offer anything at all that is important for modern frontend dev.

React has rather matured in dealing with it's own outdated Virtual DOM design, making it much more boiler platy than modern alternatives.

Other frameworks, like Vue and Alpine, let you use them "progressively" and you can even do so with a CDN to avoid having to set up npm/vite from the get go. Their intro docs have instructions for how to do so, along with the relevant caveats

React claims to be progressive, but since it's JSX it requires a compile step. Its intro docs do not have instructions for using it via CDN. You can make it work if you really want to, but it basically requires shipping the compiler to the client along with the JSX and doing the compilation client-side, which obviously scales so poorly that their docs don't cover it.

To recap, my whole point is that React scales very poorly down to simple sites. And since most site are not Facebook or the Spotify web player or Netflix (and even Netflix is moving away from React: https://x.com/NetflixUIE/status/923374215041912833), I think it's very hard to argue that React is effective or well designed.

This feels like a misattribution, due to halo effect.

Look over quick starts of React and Angular, for example. One is a well structured application, the other is a spaghetti script, all held by magic and conventions.

If you recall the (in)famous "PHP: a fractal of bad design", React basically ticks every box in this rant and then some. It's not surprise knowing it's origins, but still.

The reasons React has got traction are the same reasons PHP got traction or web frontend dev in general and have nothing to do with being well designed: it tries to "render" something visible, which makes early adoption much more interactive (hey, I've changed one line and now instead of 15 errors I have 25 different ones and the text moved!), however at the cost of any shot at long term maintainability. Before someone comes and tells me React is just a tool and you can make good products with any tools I encourage you to look at all the headliner star projects by Meta: if they cannot make websites in React at least somewhat functional and stable, no one can. Google headliners built with Angular, for all their warts, are at least for the most part functional.

It started simple and sound idea but had its quirkiness with shouldUpdate, didReceive, willUnmount. But that wasn't enough, to write decent applications, you need to do unidirectional flow. You can do that, all you need is actions, action creators and dispatchers! Now you have all this bloat that eventually leads to reflux. While you're tearing your head screaming "What the flux", redux comes along and says hey you know what, if you just write a giant switch statement, you don't need dispatchers. And everybody liked not having to read about dispatchers, so redux was here to say. If it gave more problems you can just create a toolkit around it. Besides, it claimed to be functional. Surely that means it works, right? Now you could rub shoulders with those cool clojure kids who seem to be getting all those high paying jobs. But the cool clojure kids are not impressed. They say, class is something you are, not something you write. So you hang your head in shame and promise to never write classes again. While you're untangling yourself from this mixin mess you got mixed up with, an epiphany hits you. If you can emulate a class using functions, then you don't have to write classes again! And so you finally get around to ridding yourself of classes. Sure it means you have to write more functions, and nested functions and wrap all your functions and shove the state away somewhere you can't see, but it makes everything functional, which means it works. Except for handling exceptions globally, you'll need to use classes for that. And by the way, don't worry about unidirectionality. Everything is asynchronous now.

The performance is atrocious unless you want to spend most of your time ejecting from the framework to do any realtime work, and building meta-tooling that uses direct DOM manipulation and only occasional state syncing with React, like video keyframes.

This is the approach taken by many projects, including tldraw, framer, everything from poimandres, and many things from tanstack.

The issue is that it's a "demented" framework where everything re-executes all the time and it's up to you to manage repainting and memoization manually. Because a "render" is executing the entire component tree.

The compiler is just a massive band-aid on a fundamentally broken architecture, that every other framework has moved away from.

lmao as if they didn't have to completely re-invent itself from scratch using hooks because it's design and performance were utter garbage. It wasn't until Svelte and SolidJS showed how bad Vue and Svelte were performance-wise for both of them to fix some of their glaring flaws.

> sea of "me too" frameworks

This couldn't be farther from the truth - those frameworks are completely different. Svelte and SolidJS looked at React and Vue and said "this can be done without a virtual DOM", and they did so...and absolutely obliterated them in terms of performance.

Not all problems are complex to begin with, and having a complex tool as default otherwise adds complexity to the project and also inflexibility to iterate quickly.

This is in addition to having to maintain a relatively brittle ecosystem from past feature as well as future features but that can be true for more than one area of JavaScript or other technologies.

Looking for the next curve to emerge out of the current generation of web app building.

Unfortunately

But React has kept hold to the virtual DOM and JSX for over those 12 years. While other frameworks have created more innovative rendering mechanisms, resulting in faster rendering times with simpler code.

So for the seasoned FE developer, they know there is better out there, but 9/10 jobs ask for React. And people don't seem to be interested in trying out some technology that is actually easier to use and results in a better end product. Because they are not familiar with the name, and they don't know anybody that made money with that, so better safe than sorry.

So, React has been great, but by now it's a bit of a pain in the ass sometimes.

SolidJS still has some major pain points; the one I found was not knowing whether a prop was a signal or needed to become one. The type system doesn't help much. In React, you know for sure that if your reference changes, the component reading that reference as a prop will re-render. In Solid, it's less clear whether the update will be observed.

I think you'll find a lot of people begrudgingly have to work and really wish they didn't have to. That means using what they know, which means React. Which I totally get. People want to spend time with their kids, hobbies etc. Worst case, they might be caring for others, like their elderly parents.

Give me S-expressions instead. How else am I supposed to prove to frontend developers that I didn't make those up

With hooks you still need to think about lifecycle, side effects, and state, but the syntax changes.

The real solution is overall application design and thinking through architecture, but unfortunately that’s higher effort than “just use hooks bro”.

- Work with reactive variables

- Combine three different languages

- Write modular code

- Enable highly response designs

The target platform (the web) doesn't natively support all of these things elegantly, and maybe for good reasons.

I've got the feeling that frontend frameworks are starting to converge to some consensus on some of these things (e.g. signals), and I hope the next decade will be more stable than the last.

Like which ones?

Google functionally controls just enough of a monopoly via chrome that they can generally do whatever they want (and not do whatever they don't want to do). So that standards still mostly can't do anything google isn't enthusiastic about dumping dev time into.

And they're just barely not enough of a monopoly that they can't just go wild and actually turn the browser into a locked down capital-P Product. Safari and Firefox (in that order... much to my chagrin) are holding them back from that.

So browsers just kind of hang out, not doing too terribly much, when obviously there are strong technical forces that want the browser to finally finish morphing from a document viewer to an application runtime. Finally fulfill the dream of silverlight and java applets/JNLP and so on. But nobody wants to bother doing that if they don't get to control it (and firefox doesn't have the dev power to just trailblaze alone in OSS spirit).

So instead the js people just have to plow along doing their best with the app-runtime version of NAND chips since the incentives don't want to offer them anything better at the browser/platform level.

HTML, CSS, and JS made sense back when the web was primarily text with some simple forms. It's a dog shit foundation to build highly interactive apps on. The whole thing needs to be thrown out and rebuilt.

Let the platforms for these things compete on the back end only and provide a uniform experience on the front end across competitors. This way the people writing the code that runs on our devices don't have conflicts of interest that lead them to betray their users.

It would also be easier to use because once you know the structure/flow/hotkeys for one bank you're now wizardly at navigating the interface for every other bank.

It's just such a waste to have each business writing a separate front end even though what they end up with is always more or less identical to their competitor.

Sandwich shops should compete by making a better sandwich, not by outmaneuvering each other re: how they leverage the app they managed to get 8% of their customers to install.

Interesting. How would this specification look, in context of browser standards?

> a standardized date picker across browsers

Not possible for the majority of use cases. Too much variation in what the date is used for and how the display must be constrained.

For example the lack of constraining the dates makes it unusable in most contexts (flights, hotels, meetings, etc).

Then those constraints need to interact with other elements on the page, like a checkbox for "weekends only" or similar.

Even without constraints, sometimes you want the user to go next/previous by years, sometimes by hours, etc

Date picking is just not general enough to have as a single component.

How many ways can one build a web API? Why are there hundreds of options to build one? Why do people keep inventing new ones, while the problem has been solved 20 years ago?

[1]: https://xkqr.org/decision/

But to be fair to React, it's not entirely its fault. What it did when it came out really changed the paradigm for the better, without it we wouldn't have had component-based frameworks like Vue or Svelte today. It's just that, because of being backed by Meta, it has also far outlived its usefulness and has since been far surpassed by other frameworks that learned from its mistakes, but unfortunately for whatever reason no other framework has been able to usurp it. Anecdotally at least, I've noticed that there are some pretty large and important Vue codebases out there which makes me happy, so perhaps the tide will slowly start shifting and we'll start seeing the better frameworks win out at the end of the day.

There’s plenty of users who care, but when the competition is also all slow and heavy they don’t get any choice in the matter.

Frontend skills are misunderstood by most of HN because it's a hard role that directly involves business and product wants. There's a ton of hiring (and firing) because it's not easy to find the right people who can communicate about the work clearly with non-devs, navigate the office politics, know what to push back on or when to ask questions, and still write good code.

But, also yes, it's a pain in the ass and a frustrating kind of necessary evil. So there is room for improvements.

Nextjs is a living hell. The ironic thing is AI makes it dramatically more tolerable to the point it's actually pretty good. But that can't be a good thing in terms of architectural design can it? We're in odd times.

Of course, it's easy to be a hater on the sidelines. I am guilty. Nextjs likely just does too much in it's own made-from-scratch clever way. use-client vs server is just out-of-the gate ridiculous. But then I suppose the real question is "well if you want isomorphic environment, how else are you going to do it?". My answers is "I wouldn't!" but then vercel and the powers that be seem to have won the mindshare of the product crowd. At least for now.

These things are adding up. Web would be much more pleasant without React. There are many better options out there.

https://medium.com/@fulalas/web-crap-has-taken-control-71c45...

It's crazy that the best React DX is provided through Vue's community projects.

That is very optimistic. Most React projects never get to the optimization stage, and end up with seconds of rendering and transition delays that significantly harm UX. And the amount of time spent battling hooks, re-renders, compatibility issues, etc amounts to hundreds of hours over the course of a medium-sized project, thousands for larger companies.

React router have completely bungled their marketing and PR, but they still make the best web framework out there

There's like an escalation ladder in my mind:

- just write HTML

- statically generate the HTML

- dynamically generate the HTML

- dynamically generate the HTML at a smaller granularity (HTMX et all)

- augment your HTML with custom web components that have client side behaviour.

Only if you've exhausted that should you bother with something like React. And even then SolidJS does a much better job of it than react itself does.

So yeah, I am just not seeing it. Former (and perhaps future!) React.JS dev btw.

It's not that hard to maintain API stability folks! Try a bit harder!

    Even as Next seppukus itself,
    people will likely just fall back 
    to React on Vite…

I think React by default is weird because most things don't actually need that degree of reactivity. Like, if most of the time only one thing is displaying or updating a value React just adds a lot of headache. And the amount of useEffect I see? (By necessity mind you) with the need for linters in order to figure out if you missed something in a dependency list.. I just think it's the wrong model for most projects

If Mcdonalds starts taking a backseat, it’ll because its no longer really good. And, to be fair: I’ve started to see this happen. Mcdonalds & Coca-Cola have totally taken over the food industry world, and they’ve proven to make quite poor nutritional decisions. All great empires are destroyed from the inside, not out, and I think its possible Coca cola could do this to Mcdonalds. But also even as Coca-Cola seppukus itself, people will likely just fallback to Mcdonalds on Pepsi (or, there’s Pepsi Zero Sugar that’s I think still under development, but might end up being big).

Ironically, this might even work for a while, since the API of the week will have a paucity of training data for LLMs, thus making it harder to completely replace this FE developer with an LLM. Otherwise, web development poses a strong temptation to do this since the preponderance of training data comes from this area.

I agree, part of why I detest frontend and its' ecosystem is because these things seem to be always in motion and there never seems to be a solution that is just "good enough". This seems insane to me on a conceptual level because in the end it's just putting things on display on the internet which is something we've been doing for decades. And it's not like things have got better for the end user anyway seeing how so many websites written in these frontend frameworks are abysmally slow.

I wouldn't have much issue with the state of things if I was just a hobbyist making my own website for fun but I do mind when the job market constantly demands something different. I'm glad that React is the de-facto winner because this is what I need to know to get a job but I still see positions that require Angular or Vue.js and I don't even bother with sending my resume because I know I will be rejected. From my experience most companies do not care that you have worked with a different framework in the past, they expect the exact one they've listed.

What's surprising to me is how many alternatives exist in this space. Between elm, imba, svelte, and mint, and probably more that I don't know about, I wonder how many devs in the world are shipping to prod using them.

edit: have you thought about including Form Validation to the core lib?

I can't speak to the complexity you've encountered, but for me it's pretty much zero. A button component is just a function. React-Router is good enough and code splitting is pretty much just changing how to import something. Component state is dead-easy to write by just adding a useState hook. Bundlers pretty much handle everything these days so not to much concern about size.

Your view on front-end developers having been mediocre in the past isn't far off though, at least in my experience. I noticed a big difference between the people who wanted to build nice looking pages and the ones that wanted to build applications myself. Even today it amazes me how many people have never unit tested their code, have no idea about layering an application and have poor JS/TS fundamentals. It's gotten a lot better though.

Ultimately it isn't perfect for everything, but for a lot of people it's an easy choice. And for me personally, the tons of other JS frameworks do very little in that area that I'd pick them. I'd rather spend my time working on the product. Lol, maybe its just the default because its the default at this point.

Then again, I'm hardly one to talk. The last time I wrote actual web code was JSPs in 2001. I did hack on some JS code to add dynamic table sorting to some html report pages I created later, but that's about it.. Never liked JS's idea of "we can be every programming language at once with the standards from none of them".. Sure, it's flexible, but so is a noodle..

Which is to say, that isn't really a goal or objective, imo: it's an unhealthy prediction for misoptimizations, to worship the vanilla.js performance above all past.

More-so, there were so many very very very unperformant web apps before React. So many incredibly bad ways to manipulate DOM. And the spiralling combinatorial possibilities of updating state yourself were gnarly, create enormous cognitive load on every dev in the org.

I know I've just written a pretty big anti- post.

But I feel both sides really strong. I don't want either extreme to be accepted. Inner Platform I see as good and necessary. But also I definitely hope for better someday, see us making lots of Inner Platforms, that might be much smaller / better organically interweaving Inner Platforms. Reacts flaws are significant, a full extra DOM, diffs, coarse grained updates (which I think maybe React Compiler tries to seek out?) all do so much but are a huge abstracting for an Inner Platforms, not necessary imo to what Inner Platforms would have to be. It's amazing how much React gets us, how much consistency & clarity of code & it's purpose (with its immediate mode ish rendering scheme), and the performance is overall stunningly good. But there certainly is significant overhead, lots of code to load & execution time for it. Rather than looking to return back, I want to look onwards.

The "Inner Platform" idea is an amazing & useful framing. I want WebComponents to let us escape this, to be some common system we can agree too, but I suspect even with WebComponents—if they get any broader traction—we will eventually see "inner platforms", paradigms for use and interlinkage that go beyond the very basics of HTML (although Invokers radically and excitingly open up the space of component interacting with components in standard ways!).

Maybe it's not so clear cut a decade+ later, but pieces like The Extensible Web Manifesto speak to a clear loud vocal acceptance of the web as a lower level platform, as a tool that can have higher level expressions built stop it. Theres an expectation of going further, architectures above. https://github.com/extensibleweb/manifesto

Imo it sucks that we near a decade of React Uber Alles, stealing the oxygen that would nourish the web's flourishing. And there's hope for using more of the putter platform: that React as an Inner Platform does a lot of reinvention that maybe ought not be necessary. I guess the question I want to ask is, how little can we make our Inner Platforms, while still retaining the legibility of architecture? Can we decompose that Inner Platform into smaller interoperable pieces, protocols, for how things signal and flow, rather than it being a monolithic platform? What of the Outter Platform could be better used for performance and inter-op, to de-interiorize?

It is dangerous and bad to me to demonize Inner Platforms, to attend only to notions of pure performance as the guiding factor. The karmic wheel imo needs to be going around faster harder, creating and destroying the inner platforms. We have a lot more to explore, have only a couple examples of what web architecture could be and right now the React Inner Platform is a thick boy of an Inner Platform. But it's not just getting rid of Inner Platform that's the goal.

I wish! Mostly though, React is a terrible mess of hooks with weird rules, suspense, “use client”, pedantic docs, and millions of other idiosyncrasies that have no business being this mainstream.

I think most people agree that the core ideas are great. Eg composable components, props, unidirectional data flow etc. There’s a reason that all other reasonably popular frontend frameworks adopted these ideas. It’s great that React established them. It’s just a bit sad that React established them.

This inverted behavior is the cause of most of the pain and footguns in React and React Hooks because the way state behaves in a React component is not the way state behaves in any other front-end JS one would normally write.

That's why I think for some folks who started with HTML + vanilla JS, React Hooks just feels wrong. It points the reactive callback to the component function whereas every other framework/library uses some sort of signal to point the reactive callback to a handler. Because React points the callback to the component function, then you have to be really cautious about where you put state inside of a component[0][1][2]

Even You wrote this about React's design choice which I think sums it up best:

    > The pain and suffer[ing] of hooks all roots from the mismatch between a dogmatic belief in the superiority of immutability and the harsh reality of the host language that is JavaScript 

- Vanilla: https://jsfiddle.net/qtmkbdo2/8/

- Vue: https://jsfiddle.net/vys2rmup

- React: https://jsfiddle.net/0gjckrae/1/

It should be obvious that Vanilla and Vue behave like how one would expect callbacks to work. React, because it points the callback to the component function, then requires that you be cognizant of state inside of the component function (placement, memoization, immutability, etc.). All of the pain of React is self-imposed from this design decision.

You can read more about it here: https://chrlschn.dev/blog/2025/01/the-inverted-reactivity-mo...

--

[0] https://adevnadia.medium.com/i-tried-react-compiler-today-an...

[1] https://tkdodo.eu/blog/the-useless-use-callback

[2] https://adevnadia.medium.com/react-re-renders-guide-why-reac...

Like if you take React's server components, it has a ton of problems and gets excessive focus from react devs, but fundamentally I can agree on what's its trying to solve. I understand the need, even if i disagree in almost anything else regarding it. I still don't know what the css in js phase was about.

The other frameworks (except for Angular) are simply too small when compared to the massive coffers backing React. I mean, Vue is by no means small at this point, there are hundreds of contributors and people are making good livings off of the donations Vue receives, but it's still nowhere near React levels where Meta's full-time salaried employees got paid to work on React. It's a blessing and a curse to be a FOSS framework like Vue.

* Two-way data binding spaghetti

* Boilerplate-heavy reactivity

* Opaque, framework-specific magic

* Manual state updates/transitions

React didn't win "by default" (whatever that means), it won because it was better than most of the other options at the time.

I agree that, on purely technical grounds, it isn't as strong of a framework as other competitors anymore, but React is and has always been Good Enough™ for most companies, to the point that it's not worth reaching for anything else most of the time. And I say this as someone who doesn't like most things about modern React.

React didn't win by default, it won because developers tried it and found it was better. It absolutely won on technical merit.

There's a bit of a question of whether React would still win on technical merit today, versus all the next-generation frameworks. I personally think it is still better than Svelte, Vue, etc, but I'm a bit of a React apologist.

Fun times.

React’s main benefit wasn’t technical, it was organisational. It’s so opinionated that it’s difficult for an incompetent developer to introduce very low quality code into the project. Meanwhile in AngularJS, a developer with a clever implementation idea was a terrifying prospect for future productivity.

I am so glad to be old and have lived through the transition from Angular to React. To understand why we have React. In fact I am so old I have lived through the transition from Adobe Flex to Javascript Frameworks first.

And the thing that is clear to me is that wave of Javascript Frameworks, of which Angular was one, looked at Flex and leanred all the wrong lessons (I'm looking at you two-way data binding) whilst React got second mover advantage and learnt all the right lessons.

I do like the idea of macros in general though.

A huge amount of windows apps were built with Java, you had to install the JDK separately - one such thing that comes to mind is Minecraft, another is Jetbrains IDE.

Most of the major native apps you use most often, like browsers, render things directly using DirectX and similar, not to mention games which are made almost entirely in third-party engines that are far from Microsoft display frameworks. (There are also 2-3 competitors to DirectX - such as Vulcan and OpenGL )

And of course there are quite a lot of popular apps that use other frameworks like QT

Our react/react-native monorepo has been a pleasure to work with and has massively reduced the overhead for development with a limited number of staff.

Because it's just a library, not an opinionated framework, keeping everything consistent across a development team of varied tenure and experience levels will be a herculean effort.

People always say this, but in my experience especially with modern day tooling, all the frameworks basically have the same tooling support. I mean take a look at something like the Tanstack libraries, they have support for literally every single framework out there, even some small obscure ones I've never heard of. I know there exist some big ones like Three.js wrappers and animation libraries, and especially React-specific component libraries, but really what tooling do most people miss that isn't available in Vue or Svelte but is in React exclusively? Even things like Three Fiber (for three.js) has Vue/Svelte equivalents these days.

I've been working with Vue for a long time, and at some big companies with BIG projects too, and I've literally never come across a situation where I saw a React library that didn't exist in Vue.

Hell, I'll even go controversial here and say Vue's ecosystem is better, because of the Vue Core team's decision to create Vue Router, VueX/Pinia and VueUse. These 3 things here - routing, state management and commonly reused helper/util functions - are the bane of my existence in any React codebase I've ever interacted with because there's 11 different state management tools and paradigms you have to choose from, so every single React codebase will be different from the other ones in some subtle and annoying ways. Some codebases even have multiple state management tools! With Vue, you can sort of shoot yourself in the foot if you try really hard to do so, but for the most part the large majority of projects out there stay with the idiomatic way of doing things and you don't even ever have to consider doing anything else, because the defaults just work (TM).

That's an AI problem, not a Svelte program. This happens for any lib which happens to change, not just front-end contenders. (and oh do they change, especially niche vendor sdks!)

If you can't look at a front-end component and grab the code, and pop it in literally anywhere else on your website, then you are doing React wrong, component driven development is insanely the best part of React that I dont know if people talk more about (I have not done React in a while).

With web components and a little bit of good architecture you can sidestep most front-end complexity. And server-side rendering dramatically simplifies state, because your state is now the database.

Evil people claim the technology has been promoted entirely for the sake of clearing the ways for LLMs, as it makes more sense from the "perspective" of an ANN than from the perspective of any given human developer.

In a biased Turing test like that, of course the LLM is going to be more proficient than a junior. The junior is slowed down by their vestigial expectation that these very popular tools by very large groups of very smart people actually make sense.

> The loss isn’t just performance, it’s opportunity cost when better-fit alternatives are never evaluated.

> That’s not healthy competition; it’s ecosystem capture by default.

The "It's not <plain old thing>, it's <more complex/controversial characterization of thing for emphasis>" really gives it away.

Good thing that wasn't the premise, then.

The article is specifically looking at reasons for React's success other than its technical merits. It does not deny that it has merits, nor does it deny that its success is partly due to them. It only says that its current success is no longer wholly due to them, and backs the point up with examples of alternatives that are claimed to be technically superior and that are not achieving success commensurate with that superiority.

You can disagree on the superiority claims, you can disagree that innovation in this area is a good thing (many don't!), but I think the main claim is very believable: that in the present day, React's success is heavily helped by its default status.

- mature

- stable

- with the new Vapor mode its performance rivals Svelte and Solid

- has a great ecosystem (Vue Router, Pinia, VueUse being the shining examples here)

- it's extremely simple, and doesn't come with any footguns unlike React. It's very hard to end up in weird reactivity hell situations in Vue like it is in React.

- the documentation IMO is world-class and far superior to React's (and yes I am including React's new docs, I think they're absolutely terrible)

- it's FOSS and permissively licensed, not backed or controlled by any VC or company like Meta or Vercel

Vue is actually the winner in East and SE Asia (especially in China, also partially because Evan You is Singaporean), it's just that React has the US in a bit of a stranglehold due to Meta.

Not to say it's perfect before someone jumps down my throat here, it has things I wish would improve. Namely the TS experience could be better especially in reference to events, and there is some baggage in the Composition API regarding the use of `ref` vs `reactive`, though even the docs themselves these days tell you to just stick to `ref` unless you really need a reason to use `reactive`. The tooling is also a bit annoying at times if you stick to latest Vue versions, especially since I use WebStorm which can be slow to adapt to some of its improvements (like the shorthand defineEmits syntax that was introduced in Vue 3.2, but intellisense for that in WebStorm only came around when Vue 3.5 was already released). These are my 3 biggest gripes with Vue at the moment, and to be honest I can't think of anything else as someone who is responsible for some very large Vue codebases.

"What if we abstracted away X?"

My dude, you're already operating on like five levels of abstractions, and you haven't the slightest clue how any of them work. The answer isn't another abstraction, it's learning how computers actually operate.