> React doesn't do routing. It's a view library.

and that's the problem. React itself solves a tiny subset and delegates the other responsibilities to different tools which may not align with each other. Most of the is spent is wiring making different choices and wiring them together.

On a side note what made you move away from Angular 2 to React?

> and that's the problem. React itself solves a tiny subset and delegates the other responsibilities to different tools which may not align with each other. Most of the is spent is wiring making different choices and wiring them together.

So modularity is a problem now?

well there is modularity and then there's keeping frequently used things together. I think react push modularity at the cost of productivity (opinion).

It's like breaking a kitchen knife into two: the blade and the handle, in the name of modularity.

Concretely, this is what I mean: Routing, and a bunch of other things are used together, it would've been better if react had kept the view library separate but also maintained an official router among other things

Routing isn't always necessary, if you're building server rendered pages and a non-SPA web app. Facebook isn't a SPA, so that's why they never built and subsequently released a router. They generally only open source and release things they use in production.

What's the problem with solving exactly one problem (and doing it fairly well). I'd rather have the possibility of choosing which routing library or state management and swap things as I see fit, than being locked in with whatever the framework chooses.

That's the problem, it isn't intuitive at first as to how one should add routing when using React. I learned React-Router, but the API has changed a lot between versions in the past.

You can't blame a tool for the shortcomings of another tool, though :)

Fwiw, I concur that React Router is/was a bitch (it's been a while) - I suffered through it too. A client-side hash-based router is ~10 lines of javascript, and is what I'll write unless there's an actual need for anything more.