As is often the case with these discussions, there's seldom an absolute right or wrong, but a "so what" relative to a goal. My impression of the point of React

As is often the case with these discussions, there's seldom an absolute right or wrong, but a "so what" relative to a goal. My impression of the point of React is that it allows you to quickly write web apps which are reasonably structured/maintainable, performant and not flaky. My recent (non professional experience) with React seems to confirm that it indeed achieves that. It was indeed originally weird to me to do react-create-app and have all the magic happen behind the scenes, but again, the goal is to get you up and running fast and it achieves that. You can whittle it down later or start from scratch if you want. More importantly, writing in react doesn't (seem) to make you hate yourself. I was able to structure my app so that it's logical and changes to components can be made in isolation - that's already huge. More important is the question of "how much code am I forced to write that I don't want to write" - the answer is not much. The most annoying thing I find is having to kinda manually handle changes to form fields but otherwise it's pretty reasonable. So it feels like it succeeds on its goals. Once we get to esoteric things like "JSX is bad" or "Hooks are dirty" -- ok? I guess I am not sophisticated enough to understand why that is so it doesn't bother me, and again, React seems to strive more for practicality than ideological purity so whatever that tradeoff is, is likely right. Full disclosure - I am not a professional web developer. Last time I made money making websites was 2003, though I did recently build https://playdurak.gq/ https://playdurak.gq/ with only JS and CSS on the front-end, and currently am learning react as I build a webapp for my own purposes. Edit: I guess if anyone actually wants to play the Durak game, here are the rules. https://gathertogethergames.com/durak https://gathertogethergames.com/durak I built it for my friends and I who already knew them.