Could not agree more. I also think React serves its purpose really well, if and only if you will have a complex web app with a lot of updates, connections and a

Could not agree more. I also think React serves its purpose really well, if and only if you will have a complex web app with a lot of updates, connections and a lot of abstraction in components is beneficial for you. So if you want to test everything and want to put everything in a component: Use React, it's proven to work in large scale, look at FB. But React is not the perfect tool for all use cases. Often many parts of your web app don't need component abstraction. React feels like app development, not like web development. Especially if most of your problems are more web designer problems React makes things difficult for you. One point I absolutely don't like is all the "massive" amount of tooling you need to get React working in a good way. I want to do web development not to be a webpack hero. Just to be clear: I like React and it serves its purpose. But if you want to be more flexible and don't need logic in every part of your project try something lighter like vue.js (2.0 is coming out soon), which feels like a good mixture of React and Angular best concepts, which is better and ideal for "glueing" stuff and your web templates together with some advanced logic. No need to make components everywhere. It's a lighter transition (from vanilla, jquery etc.) which gives you enough power to handle every medium complex web app. And you also have components there if you want ;)