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I started my career with jQuery, and soon after moved to Angular v1. There was nothing simple about those tools - the mental models involved were complex, diffe

I started my career with jQuery, and soon after moved to Angular v1. There was nothing simple about those tools - the mental models involved were complex, different parts of an application were difficult to isolate from each other and optimizing performance was a nightmare. Compared to all that, React is ridiculously simple - it has a very small API surface, different parts of your app are isolated by default and performance optimization is generally very straightforward. As somebody who really loves simplicity, React is by far my favorite UI library at the moment. I think when people fondly remember simpler times with jQuery, it's not because jQuery itself was simple, it's just that they remember working on less complex applications.

mjfisher 6y ago
When people say "web development used to be simpler", they're probably not referring to the front-end tooling (which has certainly improved) - but when most of the functionality of web apps were built and rendered on the back end, with new state being displayed after full page refreshes or simple AJAX calls.
- grey-area 6y ago
  > when most of the functionality of web apps were built and rendered on the back end, with new state being displayed after full page refreshes or simple AJAX calls. Most websites (including this one for example) still function that way. It works fine. JS frameworks simply are not required for most of the work the web does nowadays - you can add interactivity and immediate feedback where it makes sense very easily with vanilla js.