Whenever you’re doing design or interactivity focused tasks, and actually in many cases debugging logic, hot reloading is not only a huge step function improvem

Whenever you’re doing design or interactivity focused tasks, and actually in many cases debugging logic, hot reloading is not only a huge step function improvement, but a categorically different thing. The analogy I like to make is this: imagine a painter had to wait 3 seconds for every stroke they made to show up. Would they be as good? Would they try out as many variations? Discover new paths they could go because they had the time to “test that weird idea real quick a few times”? Hot reloading works especially well on React (and not I assume on game engines) because React, with hooks, used algebraic effects, which means all side effects are properly understood by the system and are undoable. So it’s not as hacky at all as you’d imagine. I never understood the hate for HMR as a concept. Perhaps your implementation wasn’t great, but as a general concept it’s literally a game changer. The same people who cast shade on it seem to always embrace incremental compilation (like in Rust) for some reason, too.