For me it's simply the bulkiness of it: - Babel transpilation aspect (time it takes to build, difficulties associated with ad-hoc debugging in production) - B

For me it's simply the bulkiness of it: - Babel transpilation aspect (time it takes to build, difficulties associated with ad-hoc debugging in production) - Bundling/packaging aspect (same reasons as above; time it takes to build, debugging difficulties). - Huge number of unnecessary dependencies which adds risks/vulnerabilities to projects. You could argue that it's not React's fault, that it's more about the tooling but I think that it's React's stance on inlining HTML with JavaScript (JSX) which had paved the way for all that bulkiness. From the beginning the project wrongly assumed that: - Transpilation and bundling doesn't have any costs. - Dependencies (those needed to do all that fancy transpilation and essentially re-implementing the way the DOM works) don't carry any additional risk and are not a threat to application security, maintenance...