I made a paint app with jQuery, and thought it would be a good idea to refactor to React so I could run it on a Next js server and add some multi user support, with later plans of refactoring that to a React native app.

Completely painted into a corner, I gave up after about six hours of trying to get my event listeners to work with React.

It's a shame, because there's so much server side stuff I could be doing right out of the box with Next, but now I basically need to choose a completely different architecture from the one I want because I thought it would be easier to use jQuery.

In all fairness, direct DOM manipulation works a lot better than React for the original app, but now I have to keep DOM state in sync with my server, which is a whole other challenge that React solves quite nicely.