> LOL, yes, I started using React because I spend all my time at conferences, just like 100% of the millions of people that develop in React. I'm the naive one, eh?

You're using it because you probably Googled "good javascript library" and got sent to a blog, you saw it in a talk on YouTube, or because your coworkers/friends are using it. And React has a lot of content because it was heavily pushed in the conference circuit, where people live blogged, tweeted, and so on.

I don't even think my point is particularly controversial, companies literally do this all the time (Angular was pushed almost as hard). Facebook just happened to also be a very developer-friendly and hip company last decade, so folks really drank the Kool-Aid.

I actually have developed web UIs for 9 years professionally and remember evaluating Angular1 vs React. In angular I built an app with tons of great features, but React was far more terse and honest about how things work because there were not really big DSLs or magic features, instead you built trees of JS objects that used the pretty thin JSX syntax to accomplish this. I admit JSX was of course exactly a DSL in some small ways but primarily it was just more terse and semantic.

When you think about major UI frameworks, the fundamental concept of composition is clearly key. State is the other idea at play, and their interrelation needs to have obvious life cycles to be predictable. React accomplished this as well in a very intuitive fashion that is also exactly as performant as you can wire a VDOM based approach to be. The react team’s foresight and rule based approach continues to be cutting edge with hooks, as they are more honest and terse than class-based components.

Finally, wiring up my favorite state library mobx gave me free render optimization and incredibly smooth code authoring capabilities all for one. This was around long before hooks, but still remains top tier as well.

Kool aid is both a poor drink and a poor representation of why I chose React and continue to enjoy building applications with it.

You chose to evaluate Angular1 vs React. But the information about React came to you based on Facebook's marketing of React...

The man wrote that koolaid was the decision maker, but I had literally built a high quality SPA in its main competitor before evaluating it and seeing for myself it was better. The “marketing” was being done by others like me on sites like this who had made the same decision because it was a simpler, better conceptual mode than the other web frameworks offered. Can’t believe your takeaway from “I professionally evaluated it” was “the marketing got you”, but that’s shockingly the level non UI engineers talk at thru thinly veiled superiority on threads like this.

I’m in disbelief you think a decade of one front end framework dominating software engineering of all fields is due to advertising, and not because it presents an incredibly powerful abstraction with a terse interface requiring far less magic than any other major web front end library. Pure disbelief.

I think the OP means both quality and promotion are important to a frameworks adoption.

Promotion helps it to be known, tried, given feedback, improved and loop to grow.

There is no discussion of quality. The claim is nakedly that React isn’t at the top tier and it owes its success entirely to marketing and not at all to quality. Developers have been drinking koolaid for years.

Show me where they said otherwise and I’ll walk back my tone; I don’t expect to

I would walk it back because we're talking about JavaScript, not anything important enough to get worked up about with someone.

I will plainly speak however I wish to non web engineers telling me I drank koolaid in my selection of libraries, and that marketing is the only driver of the general decision making around such libraries

It’s just plainly absurd. In front end, it went from Java -> JS transpilers to vanilla JS and jQuery to ideas to Knockback and then finally to React and that generation of frameworks. Somewhere in here TS became non negotiable and so we write strictly typed front end code on top of high quality libraries.

Meanwhile, backend guys come in and act like they know about how this went, it was just Facebook and Koolaid - those web guys don’t think for themselves. They were dictated to.

What a joke.

> backend guys come in and act like they know about how this went

I'm getting the impression you think this is West Side Story: Software Edition, and that you think other people are aware of this. It's just some individuals talking about a very abstract topic. Nothing to get upset about.

I get very upset at the idea that Koolaid dictates front end development. It’s the same backwards superiority from backend devs as I saw a decade ago, except their languages and frameworks have barely meaningfully progressed and they still like to shit on UI dev, like their work is somehow more valuable than it.

> the same backwards superiority from backend devs as I saw a decade ago

Again, even from observing you in this thread you've decided one comment represents all backend developers. You probably made the same mistake a decade ago. It's not us vs them. It's just some individuals talking.