With these articles I'm a little tired of them in that if your workplace can't possibly consider anything else and that's a big deal to you ... kinda feel like you've got a choice to make. Does that make sense for a given individual? Maybe.
Otherwise the front end land is still very dynamic and so on, I think it's great, there are lots of options.
If some boring insurance company doesn't pick the coolest new framework and picks react instead. I don't think that's a problem. Gotta go be with the cool kids to do the cool new things.
I think this article discounts the reasons behind frontend decisions... priorities are absolutely fast execution time and ease of hiring. There is very, very little reason to care about optimizing frontend performance for a vast majority of apps. Users just don't care. It doesn't make the company more money.
If a framework is easy to use and everyone knows it, it's simply the best choice for 90%+ of teams.
Front-end has seen plenty of innovation, so much that it causes a lot of burnout. So many people seem to want to reinvent the wheel for various reasons - to get recognition, to do things their own way, etc., while the existing trending tech hardly sees the surface scratched and continues to work just fine for most workloads.
>“But proven at scale!” jQuery was proven at scale too. Past success doesn’t guarantee future relevance.
jQuery is still one of the most used front-end libraries, used on 80%+ of all websites. It's easy, it gets the job done, and a lot of sites don't require more than jQuery. jQueryUI can actually do a lot of stuff to build basic web applications. React and every other tech mentioned in the article is just too heavy for most website needs. When you need a build step, that increases the complexity and requirement for developer resources compared to something simple like jQuery, which is probably why jQuery still gets used so much.
Rewrite the first paragraph replacing "React" by "HTML".
React is mostly HTML driven by data. "HTML killed front end innovation". Well that enabled standards to build real use cases on it with a common ground.
Before React, the Web world was a mess. In 2025, you have lots of frameworks to explore. React did not kill front end innovation at all, it just became a standard that gives more common understanding to building a website.
This seems like a good place to plug my library, Solarite.
It's a minimal, compilation-free JavaScript library that adds reactivity to native web components, as well as scoped styles and a few other ease-of-life features.
its kind of a blessing that SOMETHING won. We finally can just use a component. We don't have to worry about - oh I wish I could use that, but it's written in X framework.
If frontend has finally settled on something, I am really happy for frontend devs. Changing frameworks every year should be really tiresome and hardly deserves to be called innovation
With Mint (https://mint-lang.com/) I'm trying to move away from frameworks in a language to the language being the framework — having abstractions for things which are done by packages and frameworks like components, localization, routing, etc... done in the language itself.
This means that in theory the backend/runtime can be replaced (and was replaced ones from React to Preact (0.7.0 -> 0.8.0) then to use hooks and signals instead of class components (0.19.0 -> 0.20.0), and the code will remain the same.
This has one drawback which deters framework creators from choosing the language since there is no reason to innovate on something that is already "done", which leads to fewer people using it in general and hinders adoption, but I'm still optimistic.
The premise is bullshit... there were LOTS of competing options when React first came out... it wasn't really until Redux hit that a lot of people started seriously using it. A lot of the flux implementations were painful, configuring Webpack was a pain, etc, etc.
It may be the default today, but it largely earned that position by being one of the better options out there. Today there's alternatives and even Angular still has a decent following, not that I'll touch it if I can avoid it.
edit: Just adding to the pain at the time... iirc Webpack + Babel + Sass + CSS + ReactTransforms each with wierd bespoke configuration options... Babel itself was a massive pain for even trying to limit to modern-ish targets or multi-target.
React itself was a bit awkward as well, a lot of the concepts themselves were difficult, and IMO, it didn't get much easier until functional components, even if that really complicated the library itself.
I still have mixed to poor feelings on Server Components as I think it's largely a waste for the types of things people typically build. HTMLX (speaking of innovation) is likely a better option in that space.
That said, I do like MUI (formerly Material-UI, a Material Design Implementation), I think the component architecture is really thoughtful and works well, biggest issue is that devs don't take the couple hours to read the docs and even have awareness of what's in that box.
I also like Redux and even hand-written reducers and extensions quite a bit.
React's dominance is genuinely baffling to me, and even more so popularity of Next.js.
In my experience React is rarely the best solution and adds a huge amount of complexity which is often completely unnecessary because React is rarely needed.
In the early days my very controversial view was that frontend developers tend to be fairly mediocre developers, and this is why a lot of frontend frameworks suck and frontend developers just mindlessly adopt whatever the hot new technology is with seemingly no concern for performance, maintainability, security, etc.
But honestly I'm not sure this explains it anymore... There are a lot of really talented frontend development teams out there working for companies with plenty of cash to try something different. I don't really understand why there's no serious competitor frameworks in terms of market share out there.
As far as I'm aware there's no analogies to this in other areas of the web tech stack. There's plenty of backend frameworks to pick from depending on the product. There's also plenty of competitive DBMSs, cloud providers, package managers, code editors, etc, etc. I don't understand why frontend development is so static in comparison because it's certainly not that React is the perfect solution for everything.
Good. Innovation isn't the latest framework that barely improves the model and as much as front-end developers like to nit about bundle size, 100kb here and there isn't going to matter for most markets.
Honestly between React, Angular and Vue, there's enough jobs if you do want to specialise, but the mental model between the three isn't that different that a good engineer wouldn't be able to adapt.
React is boring old tech to me at this point and I'm happy with that. Like choosing Java, C# or Python for the back-end. I'd rather focus on innovating my clients products until something earth shattering comes along.
> Hooks addressed class component pain but introduced new kinds of complexity: dependency arrays, stale closures, and misused effects. Even React’s own docs emphasize restraint: “You Might Not Need an Effect”. Server Components improve time-to-first-byte, but add architectural complexity and new failure modes.
There are a lot of valid criticisms of React, but I don't think this is one of them. These problems are not really new with hooks. They're actually problems which existed in some form in the class component API. Taking them one at a time:
Dependency arrays: I cannot count the number of bugs I encountered which were due to a lifecycle containing some code which was supposed to be called when certain props or bits of state changed, but completely forgot to check one of them.
Stale closures: the second argument to setState allowed this exact bug. Also, people would bind methods in incorrect spots (such as in lifecycle methods) which has the same result.
Misused effects: at varying point, class components had access to the class constructor and the lifecycle methods componentWillMount, componentDidMount, componentWillReceiveProps, shouldComponentUpdate, componentWillUpdate, componentDidUpdate, componentWillUnmount (this is from memory and is definitely only partially complete). Misuse of these was incredibly common. An article like "You Might Not Need an Effect" but titled "You Might Not Need Lifecycle Methods" or "You Might Not Need the Second Parameter to setState" would have been very helpful in the past.
Hooks reduced the number of opportunities for making mistakes, make enumerating those opportunities easier, and, critically, made them easier to detect and warn users about.
"React by Default is Killing Front End Innovation" is probably a better headline for the post. It looks towards the present and the future, not how we got here.
All in all, this story has played out many times before, and will again. I think you either have adoption or you have a modern solution without technical debt. React had constraints that don't exist anymore that shaped its architecture, and now it has an enormous community that cannot turn on a dime.
Svelte, Solid, and Qwik have the benefit of hindsight and browser advancements. In 10 to 15 years time we'll be talking about a new batch of frameworks that have the same advantages over Svelte/Solid/Qwik.
Front end engineering has been a perpetual chase for The Shiny Thing™, constantly changing, with good excuses, but way too often throwing everything away and starting from scratch, forcing a perpetual catch up and periodic rewrites of everything.
Some maturity and a slower pace of change could be a good thing.
I mean, innovation is still happening, but it's not compelling enough to drop React for most apparently (at least not yet).
I'm an old-school web guy. React is stupid easy, but by nature of things being easy it also encourages really bad habits.
Performance is one thing (the internet is getting slower! Impressively bad!), but also webapps are becoming so incredibly overdesigned, at the expense of the user experience.
Before we had the discrete fields of front-end engineering, design, UX, etc web design was inherently limited and we used standardized shorthands for everything across the industry. With React it's so easy to throw out best practices and try to redesign every single experience from scratch. Combine that with the Figma-fication of web design and teams can get lost making pixel perfect designs that are usability nightmares.
Let's be honest - what percentage of modern React websites actually provide a better user experience than Craigslist? It's fast, I'm not dealing with buttons that move around as a page loads, unusual text sizes at non-standard screen sizes, etc. (The famous McMaster-Carr website is another example).
Why do these articles keep dismissing the innovations by React itself. The Svelte compiler is revolutionary, but the React compiler is not enough somehow. The React-Team has worked on server components, concurrent rendering, suspense & transitions. They all integrate with each other to allow for some really elegant patterns.
While the VDOM overhead does exist, it's not the performance bottleneck. More likely reasons are waterfall fetching (present in all frameworks and solvable by React Server Components) or excessive revalidation (solved by the compiler)
Huh, I wish. This is loosely related, but early in my career I worked in a company where one of the projects I was involved in was a relatively large-scale web platform. The system had quite a lot of interactive UI elements, but for some reason we weren't allowed to use any off-the-shelf UI library/framework like React (it was already around for quite some time), despite presenting arguments countless times on why it would be the better solution and save a huge amount of time.
Instead, we had to use a buggy and incomplete UI library that was built within the company, and the results were as you'd expect. Making changes to the UI was agonizing, the library's behavior and API was inconsistent, components were difficult to reuse, and you had to jump through hoops and monkey-patched nonsense to update the UI. On top of that, nobody worked on fixing the library itself, and eventually the system using it grew so large that making any fixes to the library would break the system and would need a massive amount of time to fix or rewrite all the broken components. The saddest thing was that the UI library itself did not actually do anything "innovative", just some things that are available in countless other UI libraries, but worse.
Sure, maybe it was my technical incompetence and poor decisions, but on the other hand, even then, I knew JS/TS quite well and wasn't one of those people who swear by a particular framework and know nothing else. I worked on other web-based projects before with various technologies and never had that many problems.
The main gist of this seems to be that other frameworks beat React on performance.. but who cares? The speed difference in 99.99% of apps is one that no-one can perceive
React trades this very minor performance hit to give us better developer clarity through a functional paradigm. This makes complex state management much easier to manage
A better article could've been written for this title. I just don't care about improving renders by 3ms when it's already fast enough
I think the reason React won, and is still top dog, is that improvements to performance at this point aren't worth it if you have to give up something beneficial
React (and Elm and the many other inspired frameworks) is a beautiful model for writing apps but because it is not the browser's model it is an instance of the "Inner Platform Effect" anti-pattern. The performance is never going to be as good as embracing the built in features of the browser and using minimal JS to accomplish the interaction you need.
Maybe it can be justified for real apps like desktop apps but the vast majority of web pages that use React could probably provide a better experience to users without it.
188 comments
[ 5.5 ms ] story [ 114 ms ] threadOtherwise the front end land is still very dynamic and so on, I think it's great, there are lots of options.
If some boring insurance company doesn't pick the coolest new framework and picks react instead. I don't think that's a problem. Gotta go be with the cool kids to do the cool new things.
A sentence written by someone who clearly hasn't worked on a large Angular 1.x project.
If a framework is easy to use and everyone knows it, it's simply the best choice for 90%+ of teams.
>“But proven at scale!” jQuery was proven at scale too. Past success doesn’t guarantee future relevance.
jQuery is still one of the most used front-end libraries, used on 80%+ of all websites. It's easy, it gets the job done, and a lot of sites don't require more than jQuery. jQueryUI can actually do a lot of stuff to build basic web applications. React and every other tech mentioned in the article is just too heavy for most website needs. When you need a build step, that increases the complexity and requirement for developer resources compared to something simple like jQuery, which is probably why jQuery still gets used so much.
…IOW not every app needs to be an SPA, but if it is, it’s still true that nobody needs most of it loaded at any given time. Give me my RAM back.
React is mostly HTML driven by data. "HTML killed front end innovation". Well that enabled standards to build real use cases on it with a common ground.
Before React, the Web world was a mess. In 2025, you have lots of frameworks to explore. React did not kill front end innovation at all, it just became a standard that gives more common understanding to building a website.
It's a minimal, compilation-free JavaScript library that adds reactivity to native web components, as well as scoped styles and a few other ease-of-life features.
https://vorticode.github.io/solarite/
Mobile development forums were having all-out wars regarding MVP vs MVVM vs VIPER vs ... vs ... yadda yadda.
Now I can just enjoy stable predictable tooling and I can benefit from tons of examples and documentation.
This means that in theory the backend/runtime can be replaced (and was replaced ones from React to Preact (0.7.0 -> 0.8.0) then to use hooks and signals instead of class components (0.19.0 -> 0.20.0), and the code will remain the same.
This has one drawback which deters framework creators from choosing the language since there is no reason to innovate on something that is already "done", which leads to fewer people using it in general and hinders adoption, but I'm still optimistic.
It may be the default today, but it largely earned that position by being one of the better options out there. Today there's alternatives and even Angular still has a decent following, not that I'll touch it if I can avoid it.
edit: Just adding to the pain at the time... iirc Webpack + Babel + Sass + CSS + ReactTransforms each with wierd bespoke configuration options... Babel itself was a massive pain for even trying to limit to modern-ish targets or multi-target.
React itself was a bit awkward as well, a lot of the concepts themselves were difficult, and IMO, it didn't get much easier until functional components, even if that really complicated the library itself.
I still have mixed to poor feelings on Server Components as I think it's largely a waste for the types of things people typically build. HTMLX (speaking of innovation) is likely a better option in that space.
That said, I do like MUI (formerly Material-UI, a Material Design Implementation), I think the component architecture is really thoughtful and works well, biggest issue is that devs don't take the couple hours to read the docs and even have awareness of what's in that box.
I also like Redux and even hand-written reducers and extensions quite a bit.
In my experience React is rarely the best solution and adds a huge amount of complexity which is often completely unnecessary because React is rarely needed.
In the early days my very controversial view was that frontend developers tend to be fairly mediocre developers, and this is why a lot of frontend frameworks suck and frontend developers just mindlessly adopt whatever the hot new technology is with seemingly no concern for performance, maintainability, security, etc.
But honestly I'm not sure this explains it anymore... There are a lot of really talented frontend development teams out there working for companies with plenty of cash to try something different. I don't really understand why there's no serious competitor frameworks in terms of market share out there.
As far as I'm aware there's no analogies to this in other areas of the web tech stack. There's plenty of backend frameworks to pick from depending on the product. There's also plenty of competitive DBMSs, cloud providers, package managers, code editors, etc, etc. I don't understand why frontend development is so static in comparison because it's certainly not that React is the perfect solution for everything.
Honestly between React, Angular and Vue, there's enough jobs if you do want to specialise, but the mental model between the three isn't that different that a good engineer wouldn't be able to adapt.
React is boring old tech to me at this point and I'm happy with that. Like choosing Java, C# or Python for the back-end. I'd rather focus on innovating my clients products until something earth shattering comes along.
There are a lot of valid criticisms of React, but I don't think this is one of them. These problems are not really new with hooks. They're actually problems which existed in some form in the class component API. Taking them one at a time:
Dependency arrays: I cannot count the number of bugs I encountered which were due to a lifecycle containing some code which was supposed to be called when certain props or bits of state changed, but completely forgot to check one of them.
Stale closures: the second argument to setState allowed this exact bug. Also, people would bind methods in incorrect spots (such as in lifecycle methods) which has the same result.
Misused effects: at varying point, class components had access to the class constructor and the lifecycle methods componentWillMount, componentDidMount, componentWillReceiveProps, shouldComponentUpdate, componentWillUpdate, componentDidUpdate, componentWillUnmount (this is from memory and is definitely only partially complete). Misuse of these was incredibly common. An article like "You Might Not Need an Effect" but titled "You Might Not Need Lifecycle Methods" or "You Might Not Need the Second Parameter to setState" would have been very helpful in the past.
Hooks reduced the number of opportunities for making mistakes, make enumerating those opportunities easier, and, critically, made them easier to detect and warn users about.
All in all, this story has played out many times before, and will again. I think you either have adoption or you have a modern solution without technical debt. React had constraints that don't exist anymore that shaped its architecture, and now it has an enormous community that cannot turn on a dime.
Svelte, Solid, and Qwik have the benefit of hindsight and browser advancements. In 10 to 15 years time we'll be talking about a new batch of frameworks that have the same advantages over Svelte/Solid/Qwik.
Front end engineering has been a perpetual chase for The Shiny Thing™, constantly changing, with good excuses, but way too often throwing everything away and starting from scratch, forcing a perpetual catch up and periodic rewrites of everything.
Some maturity and a slower pace of change could be a good thing.
I mean, innovation is still happening, but it's not compelling enough to drop React for most apparently (at least not yet).
Performance is one thing (the internet is getting slower! Impressively bad!), but also webapps are becoming so incredibly overdesigned, at the expense of the user experience.
Before we had the discrete fields of front-end engineering, design, UX, etc web design was inherently limited and we used standardized shorthands for everything across the industry. With React it's so easy to throw out best practices and try to redesign every single experience from scratch. Combine that with the Figma-fication of web design and teams can get lost making pixel perfect designs that are usability nightmares.
Let's be honest - what percentage of modern React websites actually provide a better user experience than Craigslist? It's fast, I'm not dealing with buttons that move around as a page loads, unusual text sizes at non-standard screen sizes, etc. (The famous McMaster-Carr website is another example).
While the VDOM overhead does exist, it's not the performance bottleneck. More likely reasons are waterfall fetching (present in all frameworks and solvable by React Server Components) or excessive revalidation (solved by the compiler)
Huh, I wish. This is loosely related, but early in my career I worked in a company where one of the projects I was involved in was a relatively large-scale web platform. The system had quite a lot of interactive UI elements, but for some reason we weren't allowed to use any off-the-shelf UI library/framework like React (it was already around for quite some time), despite presenting arguments countless times on why it would be the better solution and save a huge amount of time.
Instead, we had to use a buggy and incomplete UI library that was built within the company, and the results were as you'd expect. Making changes to the UI was agonizing, the library's behavior and API was inconsistent, components were difficult to reuse, and you had to jump through hoops and monkey-patched nonsense to update the UI. On top of that, nobody worked on fixing the library itself, and eventually the system using it grew so large that making any fixes to the library would break the system and would need a massive amount of time to fix or rewrite all the broken components. The saddest thing was that the UI library itself did not actually do anything "innovative", just some things that are available in countless other UI libraries, but worse.
Sure, maybe it was my technical incompetence and poor decisions, but on the other hand, even then, I knew JS/TS quite well and wasn't one of those people who swear by a particular framework and know nothing else. I worked on other web-based projects before with various technologies and never had that many problems.
React trades this very minor performance hit to give us better developer clarity through a functional paradigm. This makes complex state management much easier to manage
A better article could've been written for this title. I just don't care about improving renders by 3ms when it's already fast enough
I think the reason React won, and is still top dog, is that improvements to performance at this point aren't worth it if you have to give up something beneficial
Maybe it can be justified for real apps like desktop apps but the vast majority of web pages that use React could probably provide a better experience to users without it.