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Comment by christophilus | Hacker News Reader

I guess it depends on your definition of complexity. Being able to think about your UI as a function of state is a lot simpler than dealing with mutability, coordinating imperative updates all over the place, etc. React’s core idea is simpler than the paradigms it replaced. By simple, I mean as in “Simple Made Easy”[0].

[0] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=SxdOUGdseq4&pp=ygUQc2ltcGxlIG1...

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React is not simple (preact is) and what's worse, it gets more and more overengineered in order to solve the problems they have themselves created (accidental complexity in your video).

Sadly, accidental complexity is a common theme among react devs, not just ui libs, but also react-router, redux, redux-form, even tanstack useQuery() is way over-engineered and the core idea can be implemented in <50 lines and then you own the code and can make project-specific changes.

Maybe that's the biggest issue after all, people being lazy, expecting to do npm install and being able to reuse everything in any situation. Except that it almost never work like that and a lot of damage is done in the name of it... </rant>

Well, to be fair, Preact is what I use. I use the name Preact annd React interchangeably when discussing tech, but I agree Preact is the simpler and preferable of the two. But, in the context of this thread, both provide a nearly identical way to model UI.

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