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React apps with SSR is standard these days.

SSR that is javascript native, sure. This is still Ruby doing the rendering.

What's the difference? If it's SSR it's happening on the server, the only benefit of using JS is ergonomics. Ruby is fine otherwise.

Ruby can't render React code. JavaScript can. With GitHub it seems that they sometimes can do SSR for the React bits, but that must mean that they're invoking a JavaScript interpreter within the Ruby process. Which means they have the overhead of two runtimes and the jank that comes with the IPC between the two.

It's just pointless hacks on hacks. GitHub didn't need React on the frontend and any potential resource savings of client side rendering were lost when they realized they need to do SSR on that stuff too.

I've encountered so much frontend jank as they expanded that portion of the stack whereas it was always excellent when it was just Ruby SSR and minimal JS on the frontend.

Wish they spent some AI tokens on that abomination to fix at least some of the countless issues it has, because their human engineers definitely won’t.

And yet, the React/SSR infra has never gone down.