I’m currently training/mentoring a designer in using React, Tailwind, Markdown and basic CLI tooling (git and yarn). She appreciates the power and expression shes given and is learning quickly and steadily. No prior coding knowledge.

Most of this comes down to getting past the fear of coding/programming. And it is a powerful enabler, even reshapes thinking. She recently came up to me with saying “why should I write this in Word? We have markdown and I bet there is a tool where I can style this and generate a PDF”.

Some people just get development. I had one close person who was able to learn webdev and become and highly skilled freelance developer in 0.5 to 1.5 year (having played with computers his whole life), I had another friend who after 3 to 4 years still struggles to do a simple loop, let alone grasp a recursive function, at the same time he makes great designs and has good skills to implement them frontend wise. Different minds, different talents.

That's really the main reason React got popular. Somehow it lets the people who do not know what they are doing get by. At the expense of the users.

Mind you in my case the designer just really does JSX templating with it and styling. The wiring, plumbing, state and so on is not her business.

The reason I use React is mostly its composable, simple templating abstraction and the fact that it works both on the server and the client.

UX is generally improved. If a site/app is done well, it will work w/o JS enabled, loads fast and transitions even faster.

JS typically makes things better, not worse. What makes sites slow is putting in external and/or heavyweight stuff: ads, analytics, tracking, fonts, images and so on.

FWIW enabling designers is one reason I like Vue a lot (as compared to react). With single file components[0], it's quite possible to contribute knowing just html+css.

In fact the scoped CSS makes Vue files superior to plain html+css for non CSS experts -- organizing large stylesheets is hard to get right!

[0] https://vuejs.org/v2/guide/single-file-components.html

>Non-developers/designers were able to do a lot of the frontend stuff.

This always smells like "nobody could possibly do what we do" developer hubris.

The designers I've worked with on my last three large React projects could edit .jsx/.scss files. I don't really buy the idea that someone can learn web client design but it's jsx or whatever that's too much.

In my experience those different people couldn’t do different jobs. Designers could write css, but I hd to set up magic id/class incantations for them. They could write html, but changes kept breaking business logic.

Css zen gardens was a fantastic idea that I’ve never seen realized in a real project with business needs. Maybe I’ve just been unlucky.

I've seen few organisations where there was a group of frontenders specialised in html/css. Even integrated in continious development. It's a fine line, but with backbone.js and sass they could manage, but with react and postcss the line between templates and logic disappeared.

But it's less specific then that. When 6 years ago hiring a frontender they needed to just know html and css, now they need to be full blown devs.