It was fine when it started, it's the addition of useEffect and hooks that messed everything up. Although normaly I prefer functional, for react classes were 100 times better
I’d rather have a honest framework than a chimera.
I have not followed SwiftUI recently but when it was introduced I quite liked to have the main composition in SwiftUI and then writing more complex components in pure UIKit. Both could be used what they are best suited for. But trying to shoehorn good interactivity into a SwiftUI component always ended in horrible code.
I think a lot of the time React appears complex and hacky is because we tried to solve world hunger with one component. I've worked on plenty of React projects that were very easy to scale, modify and iterate because they focused so heavily on small independent stateless components.
React doesn't really contest that as-worded. It's just that, ideally, a nested component isn't the owner of important state.
Functional does not mean no state, just constraining state to inputs and outputs. Breaking that is a choice, and not good design.
Elm, for example, provides all of that with one escape hatch: ports. It is really well-defined and that not fall into any of the impossibilities you mention.
The second problem is that React has a "draw the rest of the owl" mindset. Sure you have nice frontend components but now what about caching? data transfers? static rendering? bundle size & spliting? routing?
I settled on Svelte with SvelteKit. Other than stumbling block that was the Svelte 4 -> 5 transition, it's been smooth sailing. Like I said, I'm new here in the frontend world and don't have much to judge by. But it's been such a relief to have most things simply included out of the box.
No two React projects are the same. Like, even the router has at least three different mainstream options to choose from. It's exhausting.
Indeed. I work mainly in Angular because while it's widely regarded as terrible and slow to adapt, it's predictable in this regard.
Also now with typed forms, signals and standalone components it's not half bad. I prefer Svelte, but when I need Boring Technology™, I have Angular.
90%+ of all web apps are just lists of stuff with some search/filtering anyway, where you can look up the details of a list entry and of course CRUD it via a form. No reason to overthink it.
I know you are saying you do work mainly in Angular, but for others reading this, I don't think this is giving modern Angular the credit it deserves. Maybe that was the case in the late 20-teens, but the Angular team has been killing it lately, IMO. There is a negative perception due to the echo chamber that is social media but meanwhile, Angular "just works" for enterprise and startups who want to scale alike.
I think people who are burned on on decision fatigue with things like React should give Angular another try, might be pleasantly surprised how capable it is out of the box, and no longer as painful to press against the edges.
IMO, it is only as complicated or simple as you want to make it these days, and claiming otherwise likely is due to focusing on legacy aspects rather than the current state of the framework.
FWIW, I'm not arguing that it's the "best" or that everyone should use it. Or that it doesn't still have flaws. Just that it is still firmly in the top set of 3-5 frameworks that are viable for making complex web apps and it shouldn't be dismissed out of hand.
IIRC React itself doesn’t even know anything about the Web or DOM, as that integration is supplied by the pluggable reconciler, which lives in a separate library (ReactDOM).
One could argue that with the amount of batteries included perhaps it ought to undergo a grand status change, but until then it’s hard to blame on the authors of a library that they are not delivering a framework.
> math tools or pdf generation
In this case the original scope of the library was “reactive rendering”, which sort of makes sense.
Maybe it can be done, maybe not, but the average front-end dev doesn't have the insights to fill the gaps that React has left.
My real development experience started with Django—arguably one of the best-documented proper frameworks out there even before it reached 1.x—and let me tell you: the kind of garbage I have seen once I started doing it professionally still makes me shudder[0].
I agree with you in the sense that the choice to forgo a framework and use only a bunch of libraries directly should be very carefully considered. Frameworks exist for a reason. The decision should be made with the full understanding that one would implicitly undertake a task to create a framework (even if it is a narrowly specialised one just for that project). A lot of what you do if you go with raw React will not actually be front-end development: prepare to be vetting dependencies for (or implementing yourself) very basic functionality, fighting bundlers, trying to get TS to use correct global typings for the context, managing version hell to get all of the above to interoperate, etc.
(By the way, any mistake you make will be on you. Picked a test runner that was discontinued? Some transitive dependency got hijacked? There is no one else to blame. There’s no BDFL and expert core dev team vetting things, knowing when and how to write from scratch if there’s no trustworthy third-party implementation, orchestrating working version combinations, or writing migration guides.)
[0] Indeed it would be hubris to claim I myself have never ever architected something I would later call a monster held together with bits of duct tape.
It didn't work as in if I were to ask for the router, state management, etc library, there would be a combinatorial explosion of react "frameworks", all sucking in different ways.
I am (and supposedly grandparent also) on the option that react leaves out way too much that would still be well in the scope of a 'UI framework', and while modularity can be a good thing in certain things, more modular, more moving parts does increase complexity.