They poached pretty much the entire react team in order to bet on:

- react being the most popular FE library for time to come

- gain the user's mindshare as react being now a Vercel product (something which is becoming increasingly true)

- users attracted by react and next eventually becoming Vercel customers.

They have also tried or employed several other major library authors in order to position themselves uniquely at the crossroads of major FE software and thus be uniquely positioned to transform those users again in Vercel customers.

I don't judge any of this negatively or positively but that's the case I see.

This is just a meme, an overwhelming majority of the React team ar still at Meta.

A very large chunk of the longest serving and more important jumped ship though.

More important? Or more famous?

> They poached pretty much the entire react team

I remember they got Sebastian :-) Who else?

Grabbing contributions (commits specifically) between Dec 20, 2021 – Apr 15, 2023 and looking at the workplace of authors (first #20) it seems:

- at least 2 (top #2) works at Vercel

- at least 4 works at Facebook

Andrew Clark just moved over to Vercel. I believe they also got Dominic Gannaway, who used to work on the React team, although he said he'll be working on Svelte compiler stuff now.

> Dominic Gannaway

Whom React got from InfernoJS

I don't think Dominic ever stopped working on Inferno

Dominic is going to work on the Svelte team at Vercel according to his Twitter. https://twitter.com/trueadm/status/1640761270566633472?s=20

Honestly I don't see a large use case for React Server Components, to me it's really more of a way to woo those that were still adamant about server rendering. I can see it being very useful in some specific instances, but for the most part I still advocate that one build a React site the way they always have.

Facebook has their own internal use cases (they talked about it at some show and tell when they over-hauled the FB design a few years back).

In the rest of the world, SEO is the main use case, e.g. Company X (some kind of retailer) has invested in an SPA (when what they needed was an enriched MPA) and then found they were loosing their search engine rankings. Either they:

1. Render that in a headless browser, cache the results, and serve that to crawlers (non-optimal as detecting bots is hard); or 2. Rewrite their new website to be properly architected (at cost); or 3. Buy into server rendering to serve both normal visitors and crawlers.

I worked at a company that had _exactly_ this journey. Don't forget the non-functional requirements when designing solutions, kids.

If you buy into server rendering before you write a single line of code and understand it's a trade-off it turns out to be only mildly unpleasant in practice.

The best such codebase I can think of might still have been better off overall as an enriched MPA, but given how few normal pages it had compared to the app-ish bits - thereby making staying on a single technology stack a bigger advantage - I'm not quite willing to say it -definitely- would've been better as an enriched MPA. Not quite ;)

I don't see any tinfoil-hatness in exposing the incentives that are in place of every opinator.

In philosophy, the first thing to understand a philosopher's thinking (make a model of his mind) is to read his work but the second is to read who are his influencers.

No field is truly neutral or deeply agnostic (except reality itself which is The Great Equalizer).

Vercel also employs Rich Harris the creator and driving force behind Svelte and Sveltekit. I highly doubt these are top down decisions to pump usage of Vercel’s platform. Nothing forces users to use Vercel at all.