alt Hacker NewsI also have the same somewhat controversial opinion, the frontend community wasn't ready and (still isn't) to organise a functional codebase.
The second problem is that React has a "draw the rest of the owl" mindset. Sure you have nice frontend components but now what about caching? data transfers? static rendering? bundle size & spliting? routing?
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Yeah, as a solo dev quite new to frontend, that made me nope out of React almost immediately. Having to choose a bunch of critically important third-party dependencies right out of the gate? With how much of a mess frontend deps seem to be in general? No thanks.
I settled on Svelte with SvelteKit. Other than stumbling block that was the Svelte 4 -> 5 transition, it's been smooth sailing. Like I said, I'm new here in the frontend world and don't have much to judge by. But it's been such a relief to have most things simply included out of the box.
The reason for React’s “draw the rest of the owl” (which is a great way to describe it) mindset is that it’s born not as a framework but as a library, and to this day self-identifies as such. It by design tells you nothing about and is agnostic with respect to how you organise your code, where to put tests, what bundler to use, etc.
IIRC React itself doesn’t even know anything about the Web or DOM, as that integration is supplied by the pluggable reconciler, which lives in a separate library (ReactDOM).
One could argue that with the amount of batteries included perhaps it ought to undergo a grand status change, but until then it’s hard to blame on the authors of a library that they are not delivering a framework.