Starting to see this on my team, example would be a simple marketing landing page, then for what are perfectly normal things you’d have on the page like a video player or a button they start using the components built for the web app.
Then you ask them for things to behave a little different or for some of the normal things you’d expect on a marketing page like a video auto playing silently with subtitles. Then you just start getting told “nah it’s too much work the component wasn’t built to do that”.
Such as?
I use it for my blog and love it.
This seems like an odd value proposition for a static site generator.
Even a really shitty, unoptimized single threaded non-incremental build system shouldn’t struggle too hard to compile a static site. And even if it does, if it has a good amount of features, it shouldn’t be a problem for most use-cases.
But most Wordpress-based personal sites I've come across are significantly slower than the React-based personal sites i'm aware of. There's a big problem with abusing plugins that haven't been designed with any kind of performance in mind.
Wordpress is a much better starting point from a SEO perspective than a react app built from scratch.
Performance is quick if you put it behind a CDN and disable things like comments (which I suppose you also wouldn't have in a react blog, unless you're building a commenting system from the ground up, too)
People building personal sites with React are mostly starting from one of the popular frameworks, these give you pretty sensible defaults for both performance and SEO (for which performance is now a factor).
My point was that the amount of client-side bloat in a Wordpress personal site seems to be higher than the equivalent React site, and the overall performance seems to be worse.
If you want a blog, stop fucking around with your configuration and write.
Agreed — this was the point of the article. Tooling is a distraction from what you wanted to do in the first place. Just pick the one you can get the thing done with, whether it’s Hugo or Gatsby or WordPress or whatever.
A problem with React (or any big library really) is that sometimes developers use it for blogs, forms, or other simple websites. There are many great tools out there for these websites, React is not one of them.