In my opinion Rails 8 + Intertia.js + React so much less "reinventing the wheel" (especially if you use shadcn components).
Unless you work 100% alone (and for a smallish project) hotwire leads to a real mess nobody can work on way before anything else I've ever seen in my life.
I've used turbo/stimulus/hotwire. It's best suited for STATELESS interactions withe the browser/web page. The problem is not all desired user experiences and use cases are stateless. And the ecosystem for hotwire is a minuscule fraction of all the other popular js frameworks.
If you're searching for inventory available its perfect. However if you want to update one thing based on the most recently touched input it becomes more complicated and in all honesty more trouble that it's worth.
Honestly if you're a solo Rails dev, use whatever you want. However the React ecosystem, and really all of the other popular JS ecosystems (vue, ), are very strong and you have so many available options. Stimulus is 2 steps back from jQuery, it inverted the Event delegation pattern. No one else outside of the rails community is using it.
If your page can be written with it's state being "reasonably" delegated to one of these two, hotwire is _all you need_. (To be clear, it's more common that you're just doing a bunch of work to duplicate state that already exists in the database/on the server, or handled natively by the browser, and by "delegate" I mean don't-duplicate-for-no-good-reason.)
There are many (but fewer than those who "don't get" hotwire believe) cases where it's more of a headache to delegate state to A or B. In which case you should absolutely pull in react/vue/<insert_js_framework>/etc. My go-to is: https://github.com/skryukov/turbo-mount + react because it minimizes it's footprint on the "omakase-ness" of your rails app.
I thought I was stupid or just terrible at JS/front-end stuff, because I would read and re-read the same chapter in the Stimulus docs and become more confused.
Now I'm mainly in TS-node/React land, and boy do I miss Rails.
I think the problem here is a disconnect of assumptions. Stimulus isn't meant to be an alternative to React.
If your app is (tens of) thousands of lines of JS, and that is all you know a web app to be, then React may be a sensible, battle-tested approach for you.
But if all you need is a few dozen lines of JS to polish the UX of an overwhelmingly server-side app, then Stimulus is a neat way to encapsulate and surface it when desired. In Phoenix, it slots nicely between static HTML views and dynamic LiveViews.
I don't think anyone has ever suggested you should use Stimulus to try to replicate a SPA, and I imagine you'd have a very bad time if you tried.
Didn't try the whole Turbo/Hotwire thing though. I usually use Vue for complex pages / need of state.
The fact people can't escape JavaScript doesn't stop people from being JS haters.
It just creates more of them.
The nice thing about stimulus is that it binds the pages I'm making to the javascript. It's all easy to find.
90% of what I want react for is to update just part of the page. This is simple with Hotwire now. There is no added marshalling/unmarshalling of json -- just regular crud requests the same as everywhere else. There is no second programming language. There is no added toolchain.
Adding in Stimulus and I can do most of the other things I've been wanting to do -- like modifying dropdowns.
The one place I can see React perhaps being better is when something happens on the page and I don't talk to the server. For most of my business applications, this doesn't come up as much. But say I was organizing a schedule, only to submit it to the server at the very end, React might be better at dragging things around, labelling them, then one big update at the end. Maybe it's easy in Hotwire also, I don't know yet.
It's the C++ of scripting languages. I love C++.
But would I use C++ to write a modern application? Uh, no. Not unless I'm forced to.
I am maintaining a Rails app with Vite + Interia + Vue, and it's many times easier to manage, develop, especially when working with LLMs that haven't been trained on DHH's new frontend experiments du jour.
Funny you should list those out. JS Import Maps (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/...) are literally an industry standard while Inertia and Vite are decidedly NOT standards in any way, shape, or form.
Decidedly, Import Maps are not used as a standard for dependency management in the web dev industry.