This is mostly just a complaint about how good React is. It's so good that it's difficult for the technical benefits of alternatives to outweigh the social benefits of choosing React.
Note that this is neither a major compliment to React's technical merits nor a criticism of React's competitors. In fact, I don't even disagree with the author on some of his claims, such as:
> React is no longer winning by technical merit. Today it is winning by default.
> That reflex creates a self-perpetuating cycle where network effects, rather than technical fit, decide architecture.
I agree! But teams are still largely choosing the better option, because the benefits of React are indeed outweighing the benefits of choosing an alternative. What the author is missing is simply that the technical benefits of an alternative are small except in narrow use cases. And I suspect most competent teams do in fact identify if they're in those narrow use cases and correctly choose an alternative.
I have been a part of quite a few tech stack decisions at various companies and startups. I have literally never heard an argument made for react that included merits of the framework itself. The decision was always based on a combination for familiarity, ability to hire for eng roles, and the ecosystem.
> I have literally never heard an argument made for react that included merits of the framework itself.
That doesn't mean that those merits don't exist. Most of the new React competitors are just reinventions of HTML templating done client-side. React has been dominant for so long that there's a whole generation of frontend devs who don't remember why it was invented in the first place. Writing loops in HTML? We tried that, it sucks!
It's telling that the "new" frameworks have no ideas other than to revert to ideas that were tried in the past. React is so modern it makes its replacements feel dated.
> I have been a part of quite a few tech stack decisions at various companies and startups. I have literally never heard an argument made for react that included merits of the framework itself. The decision was always based on a combination for familiarity, ability to hire for eng roles, and the ecosystem.
Couple of thoughts regarding this:
* A competing alternative would have to have really big benefits from a technical standpoint to outweigh the React advantages that you mentioned.
* When exploring alternatives IMO the burden of proving that something is better lies within the person/people that want to go with an alternative option. React is the de facto standard these days so it shouldn't be a matter of "why React" but "why not React".
If that is the point, then I feel it is made out of technical mediocrity, rather than excellence. A good team should be able to adapt the technology that best fits the task, and companies should be able to hire for it. Or stay mediocre otherwise.
The hiring issue is home made. If companies started hiring for engineering skills, rather than familiarity with existing tech stack, it would change quickly. Experienced engineers are able to learn new languages and frameworks on the job. Of course, if hiring is too petty to give engineers a month of getting familiar with the product and expect readiness from the get go, then they will continue to miss out on talent.
Im not sure how this is a negative merit for React.
Besides if you are a small company, or a start up, your job is to get things done. Not to embark on a global technology crusade to push your favourite tech.
By and large the best thing about react is the overall ecosystem, libraries, talent and ubiquitousness. And thats a good thing.
It isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it doesn't align with the idea of how good react is or the technical merits of it.
I also am not saying teams I have been on that picked react made the wrong choice. That's all in context and as you said startups are often in the "get things done" mentality where tech debt won't matter if you can't survive long enough for it to matter.
It’s good enough that the ecosystem outweighs the superiority of something like SolidJS.
React has React Native as part of its ecosystem. That’s a massive advantage. react-strict-dom is going to be a game changer for the development of universal apps.
We're talking about two different topics here. I agree, the ecosystem around react is huge and there are reasons a team would pick react. Ecosystem isn't an indicator of the technical merits of react itself though, and that's what I was originally responding to here.
Yes, that's precisely my point. The technical merits are substantial relative to the previous generation of UI libraries like jQuery. If a team were seriously deciding between React and jQuery today, I hope someone would bring up React's technical merits.
But these substantial technical merits are also largely shared by the other modern React competitors, and the differences between these modern options are small enough that they won't outweigh the social benefits of React (except in narrow use cases).
You’re assuming webdevs are rational creatures which in my experience is far from truth, since they easily fall for human biases traps such as “social proof” and “authority”.
Pretty much every social group falls prey to these biases. It has no correlation to the education or intelligence level of the group. When there is a well known saying "science progresses one funeral at a time" you know it is unavoidable.
I think it's a bit of both. React introduced component based programming, wich was great. This was copied by many frameworks. But React held the first position because of it's strong base, and because it was just very nice and good in general for a long time in the first years of React, 12 years ago.
But React has kept hold to the virtual DOM and JSX for over those 12 years. While other frameworks have created more innovative rendering mechanisms, resulting in faster rendering times with simpler code.
So for the seasoned FE developer, they know there is better out there, but 9/10 jobs ask for React. And people don't seem to be interested in trying out some technology that is actually easier to use and results in a better end product. Because they are not familiar with the name, and they don't know anybody that made money with that, so better safe than sorry.
So, React has been great, but by now it's a bit of a pain in the ass sometimes.
I can tell you I said "man react is great!" quite a few times 10 years ago when I tried it for the first time, after years of jQuery, backbone.js and Angular 1. Nowadays I still think it's great, but there is obviously no surprise and novelty about it being great since I use it every day. Like I'm sure you think toilets are a great thing but when was the last time you said "man toilets are great!"?
I don't think so. I mean, if your code is Javascript you have 1000 applicants. If your code is Nim, you have maybe 10? That's how the beancounters think about it based on conversations I've had.
So to please the beancounters you need to sell a technical decision so that it's technical merits massively outweigh those 1000 candidates.
Not all problems are complex to begin with, and having a complex tool as default otherwise adds complexity to the project and also inflexibility to iterate quickly.
This is in addition to having to maintain a relatively brittle ecosystem from past feature as well as future features but that can be true for more than one area of JavaScript or other technologies.
Looking for the next curve to emerge out of the current generation of web app building.
I think (at least part of) the reason why React has been so successful is that is scales so well: it's actually a relatively simple tool that works well for small problems. Pair it with a Vite template or something and you can be up-and-running in minutes. But it continues working pretty well as your app gets bigger, too.
But where React fails is actually in more complex scenarios. Prop drilling becomes tedious or intractable, so now we have all these different ways to manage state (Context, Redux, MobX, Recoil, Zustand, Jotai...). Your re-rendering gets slow, so now you need to start sprinkling React.memo() all over the place and adding reselect (or re-reselect!) queries and restructuring or denormalizing your store data, but then it turns out some of your props are objects that are regenerating each render cycle, so you need to memoize those too, and you end up on a wild goose chase there. Or your engineers were sloppy and accidentally put some side-effects into your components, so you've got subtle bugs you're not sure how to fix. And there's a lot of complexity or even unanswered questions around things like robustly fetching data your component needs, and maybe React Router answers them but then you end up down a whole other rabbit hole, especially when a new version of React Router comes out and breaks everything.
The amazing thing about React to me is that millions of dollars keep flowing into improving its DX further. They have spent a lot of time building React Compiler (https://react.dev/learn/react-compiler/introduction) which does all the memoization for you! This severely lightens the performance concerns.
Sure, but Svelte and Vue have had these compilation features built-in for ages without all that money flowing in.
The react team resisted these features because they went against their “it’s just a library” philosophy. They’re only copying them now because of how obviously useful they are in the other frameworks.
useEffect, useMemo, useCallback etc. add a ton of complexity and make it easy to write buggy code. I used to work at an agency so I’ve done projects with React/Svelte/Vue/Lit/Stencil/Angular/etc. I found the React projects had lots more performance issues, confusing bugs, etc. than Vue or Svelte.
I agree with the article. React is popular because it was groundbreaking and now is the default, but it’s far from the best
This is exactly how I feel. I gave hooks a real, exclusive try for two years after they were introduced (2018-2020). I didn't like them—at all—so I went back to only using React as a UI library. I'm lucky enough now to work at a place where nobody else likes hooks either.
I had problems with prop drilling on early projects but since Context has been around it hasn't been an issue. Never bothered with all these state management libraries, any time someone on my team has tried to sell me on it they've never made a strong case for it over simple proper react state management. useEffect took a little getting used to - it becomes much less problematic when you learn which scenarios to use it in (fewer than you initially think). I've had to use React.memo() at times, but it's usually done in a simple optimization pass not unlike something I'd do in a backend framework.
The only time I am even aware of these problems is when I stick my head into the javascript frontend framework "scene" where everyone acts like each one of these are dealbreakers and they happen constantly all the time.
Life is actually pretty easy as a React dev, it's a well polished and at this point battle tested framework. I wish the other tools in my dev stack were as easy to deal with.
React is totally fine for solving simple problems.
I'd classify pretty much all frontend web development I do as simple. It's pretty much just boring internal websites, I definitely don't need react for them. Could have made the same thing with any other frontend framework, could have made it server-side rendered. React is totally fine for that. The backend is generally more exciting than the frontend. React is totally fine.
The main problem I see is that most other developers are really ass at their jobs and just overcomplicate everything. I've seen very simple apps have a super complex React codebase, and due to the complexity they're always full of bugs. It's much more rare that I see an elegantly simple React app, or any other app for that matter. Everyone just always overcomplicates everything.
Using React doesn't in any way require you to make it complex. You can make React apps dead simple. And if you are comfortable working with react you'll already know all the solutions to all the problems which makes your job extremely easy. You can breeze through and make the entire simple app in a few days if you know what you're doing. Or you can pick up some new fancy tool, hey let's try Svelte. And now instead of a few days we're gonna spend a few weeks and end up with a codebase that reflects our Svelte experience. And hey look it's time to onboard a new team member - hey guy, we have these three apps - this one's made with Angular because one dimwit wanted to learn that, here's a Svelte app we made last year and lastly here's a HTMX app we made when that was hot. Good luck learning 3 new technologies you'll probably never use again!
I'm a counter example of your claim. Migrating away from React did made the complexity of my app a lot more manageable and unlocked new business opportunities that would have been impossible with React without following the JIRA route of making the software worse for 99% of users because 1% of those needed something. The project in question is Filestash (https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash), what made me switch are those 2 reasons:
- Performance ceiling. Past the point where you have used all the react specific optimisation tricks (useMemo, etc...), React just gets in the way, once you start to optimise things to reduce the memory footprint, optimise for 60FPS, dig into heap snapshots and allocation traces, your life starts to become miserable where you need a complete understanding of not only your app but also the inner working of React, and the intersection of both React with your app. At that point, you either accept the ceiling or rewrite everything to vanilla JS and have complete control over every piece of the code you are shipping to the client
- Extensibility. I am now shipping plugins which patch frontend on the fly without any build step. In practice, after a plugin author packaged their plugin (as a zip file containing a manifest), the patches are applied in real time by the server without a prior frontend build system (open up the demo instance with the network tab open to see this working from: https://demo.filestash.app/). This powers themes with icons swaps, new behaviors (e.g. a "recall" button for files in Glacier), and other things plugin authors come up with that that makes the app far more customizable and opened for new niches without falling onto the JIRA trap
All using plain strings, what happens when you do a typo? Will your app will silently break or you’ll have a compile time error? that’s a huge draw back - in react I can get a compile time error for a typo most of the time
Note that this is neither a major compliment to React's technical merits nor a criticism of React's competitors. In fact, I don't even disagree with the author on some of his claims, such as:
> React is no longer winning by technical merit. Today it is winning by default.
> That reflex creates a self-perpetuating cycle where network effects, rather than technical fit, decide architecture.
I agree! But teams are still largely choosing the better option, because the benefits of React are indeed outweighing the benefits of choosing an alternative. What the author is missing is simply that the technical benefits of an alternative are small except in narrow use cases. And I suspect most competent teams do in fact identify if they're in those narrow use cases and correctly choose an alternative.