I was thinking the same thing recently. I’ve finally realized that React is painful and overly complex. I just followed the crowd and got too deep. Backbone was elegant and simple. I could step through all the code being executed with my debugger. React is impossible to step through and the error messages are still terrible. It’s like an entirely new programming language and runtime. This “it’s just javascript” bullshit is so far from the reality now.

There is sooooo much you have to think about when writing a good React component with hooks and to ensure it remains performant and is bug free.

I really want to go back to basics. Using as little framework as possible.

I’d much rather something simple that I have full control over and that I can trace the entire execution with a debugger than all this magic crap.

I don’t even like JSX. I always pass an object in like: ‘<Foo {…fooProps} />’. Would much rather just use a literal js object.

I feel like React is a lot like dependency injection frameworks. The initialization code you would have to write without using one is actually very simple and straightforward.

Is it really that difficult to manually render components as needed? Do we actually need this huge runtime vdom overhead? Or any of these other compilers/transpilers.