No customer ever asked for React, or Angular, etc. I have never heard someone say "I wanted to buy your product/service but I'm not going to because you use boring HTML instead of React".
Use the good old proven stuff until you can't, and then look at your options. There are scenarios where using React/Angular/etc makes sense. But for 99% of websites, it doesn't, especially if your website is a way to showcase content/goods instead of being an application itself.
The "new" Reddit completely kills my 12-inch MacBook when I load a page, and it still feels sluggish afterwards. That pile of garbage literally loads more code than content.
YouTube's crap navigation system is the same - if you click on a video it will actually load it & update the page within the client using JS, and in my case it's considerably slower than just loading the server-generated page from scratch. I often find myself opening videos in new tabs (and closing the old ones) or hitting refresh as soon as the URL bar is updated just to avoid this shit because fetching & loading a brand new page is actually faster than their so-called "improvement".
Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/redesign/comments/8smbob/an_update_...
Why?
I'm not talking about "app"-like sites (like Gmail), where it -somewhat- makes sense to use Javascript, but blogs or information sites (i.e. text + images).
The worst is that when you look at the domains to unblock, you often get dozens (not counting the Ads networks that I have already marked as untrusted)! This is crazy, a pretty simple page should NOT require all that complex (and slow) architecture.
And don't get me started about the comments sections! Not only do they usually require Javascript to see anything (which is stupid since just reading them should not require it), but ALL their UIs seem to compete for the title of "most aggravating interface ever". They always seem to try their hardest to be slow, confusing, and once you get more than a few dozen messages on the page (as they load on demand), they become simply so difficult to use that it's a chore then a torture to try to reach the last (or first) one.
I could also rant about the loss of bookmarking functionalities (because of infinite scrolling for instance), and of the previous/forward browsers' buttons...
In summary: in many cases, if not most, Javascript is used in a way that kills the user experience instead of enhancing it. And I don't see things getting any better, quite the opposite.
Works pretty well.
On the .NET front MS is even bringing back a saner script management for Web devs.
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/webdev/2018/04/17/library-m...
The problem is that every site out there thinks they need one while in fact only 1% truly needs one.
Loads of mine have, but I write things for other software companies.
If someone want to learn to do a simple website I recommend Grav CMS. No database, just edit your pages with markdown and off you go.
The tech I know may no longer be suited to do the things I want...
The old tech that the author knows doesn't work for the modern web. He says as much. If you want to build the new shiny you have to use the new shiny tools. You don't have to make a website that does all the fancy reactive, responsive, Web 3.0 stuff. You can make a site exactly how we did it 20 years ago today and it'll work fine. But if you want to build a modern website, you've got a giant pile of things to learn first.