The answer is simple: Abstraction, or the lack thereof. Building real-time web applications are difficult. But the difficulty is accidental complexity that coul

The answer is simple: Abstraction, or the lack thereof. Building real-time web applications are difficult. But the difficulty is accidental complexity that could be abstracted away. However, most of the tech stacks are not there yet - mainly because the request-response model is good enough for most of the sites, so the industry wouldn't push it forward wholeheartedly. Maybe the situation would start to change after WASM take off, or maybe not. The best bet is to work on platforms that already have great WebSocket support. PHP might not be a great choice. Node.js is okayish but not great. Blazor sounds interesting but I'm not sure about the performance. Elixir/Phoenix is probably the best bet for now. It has nice, abstracted APIs, it's performant, and it can form clusters either by itself or with Redis. It's very hard to scale WebSocket because of its stateful nature, so please look for platforms already solved this problem.