Having built a SPA without React it was 100x harder to do it. You had to be careful to update so much state that there was no way really to not break far away stuff when making small local changes. It was a maintenance nightmare.

Yup. And jQuery, awesome as it was, wasn't designed to address the state issue. But it was the best DOM abstraction, so that was the backbone (no pun intended) for many pre-framework applications. It was a spaghetti nightmare.

I really like React. I don't know if this particular pattern was explored before, at least I didn't see it, and I used plenty of UI libraries, from WinAPI, MFC to Java Swing and plenty of web frameworks.

I think that JSX support is a genius thing. Especially with modern TypeScript. I spent so many hours because of string-typed templates that I really value templates integrated within a language.

I really liked original React version with classes. It had its rough edges, but it was simple and accessible to me.

Modern React with functions is not simple. It's so far from simple. I consider myself pretty talented developer. But those hooks - I think last time I had to spend that amount of time is when I learned Scheme continuations. That thing really broke my mind. Well, hooks didn't break my mind, but they just seems to be very easy on the surface yet very hard below surface. I read plenty of articles yet I still don't fully understand them (although I think that at least I can use them without bugs).

For me React is like ORM. It's very powerful tool. I allows to tremendously cut the development time. But it requires absolutely expert knowledge on the team. And it looks so deceptively simple at the same time. This is a bad place for technology to be in.

I first tried react rigtt as it was shifting from class-based to functional components. I actually really liked the functional approach at first, but to me the promise was just pass in props and spit out html. No async components, no hooks, no data fetching, at best it just needs a way to attach even listeners once that fire custom events.

With all business logic outside the render tree it makes a ton of sense and really can be understood extremely fast. Props in, events out. Done. Today everything is a component, and components even have to understand whether they are in the server or browser and how to manage that handoff. It's such a massive dumpster fire of convention-as-a-solution.

> We keeping asking more of it and stuffing more and more complexity into react so that monolithic frameworks can be built with it. It was never designed with that goal in mind and is taking more and more complex features to try to keep that ship afloat.

The trouble with a smash-hit library (or, let's be real at this point: framework) is that adding more whizz-bang features to it becomes irresistible, from a résumé-building perspective. Add in that a bunch of the devs are paid very good money to work on it, and they really do have a lot of incentives to keep finding more shit to add to it, rather than calling it "done" and letting it enter maintenance mode.