The reason the web changes so fast, and there are so many rewrites, is the same reason a puzzle whose pieces don't fit together keeps getting shifted around and restarted.

People are looking for a satisfying non-leaky abstraction to build upon and they don't find it with web technologies. They get close, but those last few pieces never quite fit, and we lack the power to reshape the pieces, so we tear out all the pieces and try again. Maybe this next time we'll find a better way to fit them together.

Svelte was pretty much stable between 2019-2024, of all the frameworks it probably changed the least. It's only with the recently released Svelte 5 version that things changed a bit.

You have a point but you're giving Svelte unfair criticism here.

> Figure out what works and keep it, is that so hard?

Yes, very. Perfect design upfront can eliminate the need to change it later, but you never get it perfect, so you continue to "figure it out" for many years with many failed attempts in the process.

ReactJS is pretty consistent since last 5 years and probably won't be changing for next 5 years.

The core technology behind Svelte remains the same, and the performance results are still valid. There is no code or feature comparison happening here, so I don't see how this is relevant to the article. Before Svelte 5, it has been by far the most stable framework of the big four.

I think it's a combination of boredom and job security.

> Figure out what works and keep it, is that so hard?

Well, short answer is that it's been in the "figure out what works" phase for many years now. The developer experience has improved a lot over the years, but it's at the expense of constant breaking changes and dependency hell if you want to upgrade existing code.

If you write your stuff in a web framework, the rewrites aren't pointless. Well, they are, of course, but you can't really avoid them, because the old stuff stops getting updates within a year, so you either rewrite or can't update the framework, security updates included.

Made me just give up on web development.

I think React has an at least somewhat reasonable track record in terms of backwards compatibility? Still not perfect but much better than all the other frameworks.

Tbf, the versions used in this are all roughly 5 yrs old.

And svelte was pretty new at that time, hence it would make sense that it was figuring stuff out, I think.

Though angular has gone through multiple concepts during this time between version 11 (as used in this article) and the current 20 - and especially signals and zoneless would have also massively impacted performance.

My VanillaTS project has been working well for the last six years. The most painful part was when I moved everything to esbuild w/ async imports (and ES2017 modules) but now I don't even think about it. npm audit gets kinda mad though.

Speed of development and community support is a much better experience in the web space which I think coincides with why there's enough free time and resources around to generate "n new JS frameworks a week". compose and swiftUI, for instance, emerged with component based architecture patterns much later than what was already considered standard in modern web dev.

Yeah they all do exactly the same thing just packaged differently. All of web dev was essentially a solved problem probably as far as a decade or two back.

He also chose a Vue version that came out in 2020.

Vue 3.4 (2023) rewrote their template rendering engine to be 2x as fast as well.