alt Hacker News> React is the worst JS framework except for all the others we've tried.
> React has its tradeoffs, but we got here after a long slog of other things that don't work.
I strongly believe it's because of trying to achieve the wrong goal with the wrong tool. So many websites could just be bare html pages and forms with just a sprinkle of JS for some interactivity, but they want to add JS for whatever reason.
If you can have a complete repo browser without JS (cgit), most web applications can survive without it too.
Replies
fishtoaster • today at 2:51 AM
Sounds like your argument is with SPAs, not React in particular?
➕ show 1 reply
There are four culprits here and neither is due to JS.
First is the pursuit of polish. Each extra 1% in polish adds tons and tons of lines of code. If you want that level of polish on a non-SPA, you'll still have to add all that code then reload it one page at a time. I see a lot of these "bare HTML pages" and they are lacking important stuff like i18n/a11y/WCAG compliance. Try adding all that back in and you'll see your website bloat right up.
Second is bloated do-everything libraries. Ant, MUI, Mantine, or whatever else is aimed to be a superset of all possible website needs which means that the components you adopt have tons of features and bloat you don't need that slow down loading, parsing, and execution. Simply replacing that <Paper> component with a <div> and a few lines of CSS will get you the same thing you want, but will save you layers of unnecessary React components and sometimes a layer or two of unneeded DOM nodes as well that were added because the <Paper> component had weird interactions with some other component.
Third is manpower/experience. Many/most JS devs today (sad to say) don't actually know how to make that simple <Paper> component on their own. Those that do often skip it because they've got too much to do already. I've lost count of the number of teams I've seen where a bog-standard backend has 25 people working on stuff while the frontend team has 3x as many total lines of code (which are often times handling human-computer interaction issues the backend couldn't even imagin), but only 3-4 people to maintain it all.
Fourth is of course management. Designs on the backend change at a trickle while changes to the frontend arrive in a torrent. Understaffed frontend teams can't keep up with all the things shoved on their plate, so they usually can't optimize things even if they know how (eg, only a small percentage of SPA actually know/take the time to lazy load various parts of their apps to improve load time).
Fix these things and the SPA performance will improve drastically and almost certainly exceed BE templates with some jQuery spaghetti.