Most websites built as SPAs using React are slower, buggier and more expensive to maintain than if they had been built using mostly server-side rendered pages, like we did in the 90s.

The problem there isn't with React, it's with people who build websites out of a tool that's designed for huge applications.

Most websites shouldn't be built with React. Most single-story buildings shouldn't be built out of steel I beams. That doesn't make them a bad material, it just means you shouldn't use them if a simpler material will do.

> Most single-story buildings shouldn't be built out of steel I beams.

But many are! This is the issue. 10-50x the effort, complexity, hours, expense. Lots and lots of steel, everywhere, because managers heard that Megacorp uses steel and now insist on it.

Steel beams everywhere.

Time to develop a low-JS vanilla SPA framework called "Jet Fuel"

Hey actually React has nothing to do with Megacorp at all. We adopted React in 2015 on a small team (less than 10 engineers) as did many other small startups at that time. The decision to use React on a small team is the same as it would be on a large team: It dramatically changes frontend development. It makes this career worth while. I did 5 years before React, and now still using React 7 years after with no competitor in sight.

I don't use React because I'm being forced to. We chose React!

Depends on the problem that small team is solving. I've used SPAs on several "small" teams (Angular*, Backbone.js) and they are very effective for solving the kind of problems that are otherwise solved by native applications (winforms and the like). When you have hundreds or thousands of forms / screens in a system then SPAs provide a large reduction in complexity.

For websites: we all like to dump on PHP but it was literally designed to build websites with relatively limited features / large reach - which covers a large swathe of the web.

So SPA: good for ERPs, CRMs etc but bad for webshops, social networks, TODO apps, news sites, Streaming sites, blogs etc.

[Why Angular? React is technically interesting, especially that it's build around the Rx pattern popularized in dotnet, however I have a deep-seated hate for Facebook for their key part in making Brexit happen which trumps any technical merit. Vue wasn't a thing back then]

This 1000x. Every nail looks like a React app. Most frameworks are overkill for most sites/apps. There are definitely ones that need that level of architecture, but that isn't most of the time.

Steel is superior to wood in almost every way. Currently they are almost the same price as LVL beams with out the 4+ back order wait.

Thank you sir, for you sir comment of sanity

I think it's using the right tool for the job. I thoroughly regret not using Vue or other major JS framework 5-6 years ago when building out our new application. While the server-side is solid the client-side is sort of a mess. A mix of a ton of different things, underscore templates, jquery, etc. It's not an SPA but any modern web application requires a ton of javascript.

We are slowly incorporating Vue into some aspects of the application and the code is just so much cleaner and legible, with better performance in a lot of cases.

SPA loading performance can be improved by splitting React app into multiple SPAs each rendered by its own smaller bundle. Additionally, for many websites, the landing/index page of a SPA can be prerendered at the build time. The result is the best performance ever achievable for many (but not all) websites.

Once SPA has been loaded, it switches to SPA internal pages faster than "like we did in the 90s" because for static pages there is no network round trip and no delay called TTFB. For dynamic pages, making API call and fetching API data (to use it for CSR) likely takes less network bandwidth than fetching HTML generated on the server (as a part of SSR).

Also server rendering uses server CPU and it's never totally free. Especially if server side needs to be scalable.

is there ANY evidence for that. because i work since two decades in the industry, saw both worlds , and am much much happier now than ever before?

> infinitely scaling frontend features

Front-end features can "infinitely scale" without React. Career growth is great, but, in my experience, after a while (maybe ~Senior Engineer), it becomes technology-agnostic.

We wrote enterprise applications with jQuery and Backbone. It didn't scale. React fixed everything. There is no post-React.

I'm not "technology-agnostic"- I only use React, and will only work for companies that use React. React is the best.

Also, XML is the pinnacle of communication. How many conferences have I been to on it? I'm going to be using XMLSpy til I die!

- you, if you'd been born 20 years earlier

> There is no post-React

Oh, you sweet summer child.

This is quite a reactionary comment.

I imagine the career growth would have happened regardless of which framework became the new hotness. That is, any framework with similar usage/growth would have done the same. I've just seen the pattern too many times.

Maybe, it's hard to say. Whether or not it caused it significantly or how it was involved, the "react era" has coincided with a huge increase in demand, pay and respect for front-end specialists.

A whole webdev cohort came up on and with these technologies, were taken seriously because of their mastery of them, and have moved into areas of tech and engineering that would have been absolutely off-limits to "mere" html/css developers.

I'm not willing to claim that react alone made that happen, but it's not at all clear to me that it would have without react having the timing, momentum, and cachet that it has.

No, the career growth happened in 2015 when we adopted React and stopped endlessly inserting JS and CSS tags from jQuery plugins. Backbone made things worse. Angular made things worse. React objectively changed my life and allowed me to work several remote jobs at once. I watched half a dozen startups adopt React for the better. There is no similar growth or usage to React. React is the king.

Sounds like a religious experience.

Exactly. The first time I observed this it was some Perl/CGI framework who's name I've forgotten. Then ColdFusion, then COM, PHP (Cake, Zend) and on the front there was that hotness before jQuery (which I've forgot), jQuery, that other one for a spell and now React.

Loads of people board the train at the most recent stop and are amazed how "fast" it's going.

At least with surfing all the waves are different - in web-tech it feels like the same wave over and over.

Just wait (shakes cane) it'll happen to you too.

> there was that hotness before jQuery (which I've forgot)

Prototype and Script.aculo.us? I remembered being in Prototype camp because I deemed jQuery to be too different (and in a hindsight, that was one of my worst decision in tech)

There's also YUI, MooTools, etc.

> Script.aculo.us

Yes. Thank you!

What does one have to do with the other? React may have helped you with your career but that doesn't mean it can't be a monstruosity

Yes. Winess Java.