React is THE web framework. The difference between react and previous frameworks is like night and day. Maybe nowadays people are seeing the rough spots with things like useEffect but pre-react web was literal hell for web development.
React is a web framework. Like everything else it has some good points (popularity) and bad points (performance, support cost).
When you get more experience, one thing you’ll learn is that when “literal hell” isn’t entirely untrue it’s a social problem. If your organization isn’t good at maintaining a large application, a tool won’t save you. It’s very common for people to look at problems and blame the current tools because that’s where the symptoms are and, critically, it doesn’t require saying anyone needs to be doing a better job managing the project.
JFC, "when you get more experience". If you people are going to be throwing around this bs you better have your linkedin on your profile and you better have 20 years of experience.
edit: Which you do, touche. That being said, I'm experienced, I'm just hyperbolic and emotional about things. Not everyone that's experienced has that "cool, I've done this a million times before" demeanor ok.
Let’s just say my first for pay project was working with a custom Gopher server and I played around with JavaScript when it first came out in beta with Netscape Navigator…
Okay, I’ve been writing JavaScript since before it had that name so you’re only low by 7 years or so.
Again, I’m not saying that React is horrible – only that people are prone to misattribution leading to overstating the benefits of their current favorite tool relative to other factors. That works both ways, too: it’s not uncommon for people to credit a newer tool for productivity improvements due to their skills increasing over the same time period.
Frameworks come and go. I rather give the credit to the creator not the company. It solved there problem and open sourcing it benefits them more not the community. Now they don't need to train new Facebook developers on some internal framework. Now 1000s of engineers move their framework forward vs only the ones they pay.
I remember when Perl cgi-bins blew my mind. A webpage wasn't just static HTML and images anymore, it could be a program that did arbitrary things! Nothing new under the Sun.
Frankly, if React didn’t exist, and assuming none of the other post React frameworks ever came to exist, we would likely have a duopoly of Angular and EmberJS. I personally do not like Angular at all, but EmberJS was awesome. It’s performance was slightly sluggish but nothing having more developers due to higher popularity couldn’t have solved.
If I had to be absolutely honest, the developer experience side of EmberJS was miles ahead of what React is today. NextJS is only just coming closer but I’m not even sure it’s there yet.
If React hadn’t existed, and more people had experienced EmberJS, I think web development would have been a far better experience today than it is right now.
The more I think about it, the more I’m switching to the camp that React wasn’t just not a necessary positive to web development, but was in fact a massive negative.
FB’s devrel dollars completely drowned out EmberJS, which was being pushed by a very small indie team, and web development would have been immeasurably better if we were using EmberJS today, as opposed to React and its bandaged on partners.
