Absolutely. React started off simple but with things like Redux added on, it has become unnecessarily complex. The performance benefits of React is overrated. Javascript is so fast these days that you can rerender the whole page on navigation and no one will know the difference. I built a whole social network site based on a simpler alternative, UIBuilder, and you can see for yourself that it is performant: https://circles.app
UIBuilder is here: https://github.com/wisercoder/uibuilder
And once it's well baked enough, it works very cleanly with universal rendering strategies. It means you don't have to separate logic into components where it doesn't belong because the server render ignores loading logic in componentDidMount. It's suddenly all first class
And, then, theoretically you can remove Redux and just use Context
It has gotten really wacky along the way. I hope they don't lose sight
Since Fiber, React has become difficult to reason about. There is a stateful crawler that is going up and down and sideways in your hierarchy, running code with side effects and telling you that it will isolate those side effects. The golden brick road is surrounded by briars, because you cannot know the nuances of that renderer’s contracts, because you cannot read the code of that renderer, because it’s too dense to understand. I miss the days when React was a simpler “dive” than Angular in this regard, and I could boast about its simplicity. In the interest of efficiency, we have forgotten how to climb the walls of our garden.