alt Hacker NewsIt's both. The majority of web developers today suck, plain and simple. They thought they could make a lot of money doing web dev and don't approach engineering as an art form or a science. They just scrape by and do not level up on their own outside of or during work.
I've had to come in and rewrite apps before where the developers had full leeway and still produced an unmaintainable behemoth of third-party components loosely taped together.
Also, React is a nightmare. An absolute minefield with zero cohesive vision, with an ever-changing API and a culture of shaming developers who haven't switched to the new React paradigm-of-the-year. For a framework meant for serious adults, I'd check out mithril. It's small, API-stable and intuitive, and gets right out of your way.
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> React is a nightmare ... culture of shaming developers who haven't switched to the new React paradigm-of-the-year
proceeds to shame and suggests changing to the new paragdigm of the year.
> For a framework meant for serious adults
> Also, React is a nightmare.
I think React is a “nightmare” in similar way that JavaScript is a ”nightmare” - it certainly can be, if you abuse it, and it makes it a little too easy to do so.
However, you can take “just the good parts” and ignore the rest. For me, that means using React as a rendering library and managing state almost entirely outside of it.
I've introduced mithril at three different companies to audiences of non-UX engineers and it went well each time, resulting in small, static, API-driven single page applications. For my Software Engineering class, I'm able to get the basics across in a day and let students iterate without having to set up build tools for them. Huge fan.
React seems to be a self-perpetuating ecosystem at this point, and I keep reading about the next framework-of-the-month being tied to a specific vendor or having an uncertain future with funding/bugs/forks.
I'd think it has about 60% cohesive vision, but that's just a ballpark, 0 seems way to low though.
> The majority of web developers today suck
Because they are what we called script kiddies back then, copy-pasting from SO and now LLMs.
I do not even know if they would classify as "junior" devs.
This does not apply to ALL web developers, but many.