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While there are knowledgeable people that dislike React, and there are things to criticize about React (what normal people would call trade-offs), A large swath

While there are knowledgeable people that dislike React, and there are things to criticize about React (what normal people would call trade-offs), A large swath of React hate comes from "Fullstack Engineers" that are actually Backend engineers. They barely do Frontend, and when they do, they have no idea how the underlying tech works. They literally don't know what React is. They don't know what it does. They don't know it's not just for SPAs. They think it includes a bunch of shit that it doesn't. They hear React and think "I don't know what mounting is, but I programmed once in NextJS and it was fucking awful". So we get seething comments from people who get frustrated with a build system, or with "breaking changes" even though old versions of React work the exact same way. It's a client-side rendering library, why do you care about breaking changes? Or we get people swearing that Vue is magnitudes better even though they both work roughly the same with minor differences. And I get frustrated, because I know these people otherwise would've slapped JQuery on a website and written a horrific CSS selector that will break in 4 days when someone else tries to restructure the HTML. Because we see abuse most visibly in popular tech. I use it all at work. JQuery, Vue, React, Svelte, HTMX. I can't say I'd shy away from any of it, but I can't say I have a massive preference either.

llbbdd 1y ago
Amen. If you could spin a turbine with the ire directed towards frontend engineering on this forum alone, we could retire the sun. I think there's a defensive quality to it. It was at one point an overwhelming meme that writing JS was somehow not "real programming", that writing web apps is "easier", and lots of engineers who should otherwise know better internalized that and then apparently froze in time. Then when they try to hack it for themselves and encounter any resistance at all, they get edgy and form ignorant opinions that boil down to "I hate React because I got frustrated and React was there". Turns out the skill transfer does work in reverse though. On the backend your code often only has to run in one environment, with machine specs you get to choose, and responses for most things are fine measured in seconds. Unbelievable luxury. React is, for its utility, an incredibly minimal library. It's hard to point to anything in it that it really shouldn't be responsible for. Most of the problems it solves with that minimal layer are among the very first problems you run into trying to build any serious web application no matter the stack or structure. Even if you don't use React, you'll either write bespoke spaghetti UI update code or more likely you'll end up with the pieces of something that sure as hell looks like React if you squint.

llbbdd 1y ago

Amen. If you could spin a turbine with the ire directed towards frontend engineering on this forum alone, we could retire the sun. I think there's a defensive quality to it. It was at one point an overwhelming meme that writing JS was somehow not "real programming", that writing web apps is "easier", and lots of engineers who should otherwise know better internalized that and then apparently froze in time. Then when they try to hack it for themselves and encounter any resistance at all, they get edgy and form ignorant opinions that boil down to "I hate React because I got frustrated and React was there". Turns out the skill transfer does work in reverse though. On the backend your code often only has to run in one environment, with machine specs you get to choose, and responses for most things are fine measured in seconds. Unbelievable luxury. React is, for its utility, an incredibly minimal library. It's hard to point to anything in it that it really shouldn't be responsible for. Most of the problems it solves with that minimal layer are among the very first problems you run into trying to build any serious web application no matter the stack or structure. Even if you don't use React, you'll either write bespoke spaghetti UI update code or more likely you'll end up with the pieces of something that sure as hell looks like React if you squint.