React's first flavor (class-based components) are fully backwards compatible with today's React versions. It doesn't seem odd to me that a popular library ident

React's first flavor (class-based components) are fully backwards compatible with today's React versions. It doesn't seem odd to me that a popular library identifies its pain points and improves its APIs & patterns over time. That's the beauty of open source software with large communities guiding their growth. Today, it's moving heavily towards server-side rendering because the client-side / SPA format is already quite mature. Their approach with server components is an optimization path that uses concepts/patterns from already popular server-side languages and frameworks + templating, and blends them seamlessly with client-side development, giving engineers the best of many worlds. This was a natural evolution from NextJS which popularized this way of using React, and it's giving engineers more choices in how they build + optimize their apps.