Surely a more reasonable perspective is that React actually solved a real problem, and the fact that there's a big company backing it is actually a benefit because 1) there's a lot of money and experience poured into the project, 2) it's likely to be supported even if the lead dev gets hit by a bus, 3) it's an easier sell to management over <insert alternative by random dev>?
I'm no fan of Facebook the company and product, and I avoid client-side code as much as possible (yay Phoenix LiveView), but I think React is quite neat and made my client-side work easier. I'd also argue that it paved the way for an important shift in how front-end frameworks do their thing, and we're all better off for it.
You have components with a render method, and in that render method you return other components which you can pass data to via "props" - that's basically react in a nutshell.
I've noticed React is often conflated with the wider ecosystem it is a part of (Webpack, Redux, Babel) - perhaps this is the complexity you are referring to, but to be clear React can be used without any of these things.
And sure React being developed by Facebook couldn't have hurt in terms of it gaining popularity - but the real reason it took off is that in contrast to what you said it removed a huge amount of complexity by alleviating the burden of developers having to manipulate the DOM directly in ad hoc ways. Instead of having to manually add classes, add elements, remove elements, append children, you could just say given this piece of state, give me this.
> Anything that comes out of Facebook is just pure manipulation.
This just shows that your issue lies with facebook the company, which is biasing you against react - the technology.
I disagree with this. Everyone claims that you can use React without JSX but no one does it. Aside from ugliness, the main reason why no ones does this is because you would be missing the most useful aspect of React which is compatibility and consistency with the rest of the React ecosystem. So you cannot separate React from its ecosystem. All this complexity has become tightly intertwined.
If you use VueJS without a bundler (which is actually feasible), you will be surprised how much simpler and elegant the whole development experience is. Once HTTP servers start supporting static push of scripts, we will not even need bundling in production.
This is just plain wrong. Firstly using JSX or not will have 0 impact on compatibility with other libraries in the ecosystem because they are not coded against JSX they are coded against what JSX is compiled down to. The main reason people use JSX is because people like it.
Also you say the complexity has become intertwined but I don't hear any examples of how that is the case?
> it's one of those tools that tries to take away complexity by adding complexity on top
It's one of those tools that purposely abstracts unproductive, inefficient complexity that we were not aware of before into a higher-level one, forcing us to be more mindful of how we do things. A matter of tradeoffs, I would say, and there's gotta be a limit to how 'simple' one thing can be. Also, you're conflating React the library with the ecosystem around it.
On a sidenote, all the tooling and boilerplate React came hand-in-hand with was markedly a net positive for me. It was in picking up React, during my career, that I learned why tooling is important, picked up tools like Webpack and grunt, learned myself how to do CI/CD and other stuff.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parity_of_zero#Education
Claims made by students:
"Zero is not even or odd."
"Zero could be even."
"Zero is not odd."
"Zero has to be an even."
"Zero is not an even number."
"Zero is always going to be an even number."
"Zero is not always going to be an even number."
"Zero is even."
"Zero is special."
We need more old coders around!
Old coders never die, they just get frozen until their favorite programming languages come back into fashion.
What is-odd does is to throw an exception if you pass anything that isn't a safe integer or a string representation of a safe integer. Otherwise it just returns n % 2 === 1 (after converting string to int if necessary)
Isn't the parameter always floating point in Javascript? (which does mean a package like isOdd will have to incorporate some level of mysticism...)
I can understand how fundamental education teachers don't grasp modern Algebrism and believe that Math is formed by fundamental, sacred definitions. But programmers ought to know better.
If React was not by Facebook, it would not have gotten popular at all except as a 'cool hack/experiment' - Nobody would have seriously tried to incorporate it into a production application.
As soon as you scratch the surface, you understand that it's one of those tools that tries to take away complexity by adding complexity on top.
The story has gotten more complicated though because now React has so many components and there is all this conveninent tooling and boilerplate around it but still I would never choose it over VueJS.
Anything that comes out of Facebook is just pure manipulation.