had to have hooks though. And vanilla-OO had to go in favor of trapping state in closures, which is cooler because it has functions and not methods.

You can still use vanilla-OO React.

Do you complain when other frameworks add new features without breaking backwards compatibility?

    > You can still use vanilla-OO React

What we want is signals-based React because it would singularly fix the issue that the compiler is solving for and remove the need to even have `useMemo` and `useCallback`, improve performance, and remove a huge footgun.

Because it has such a huge marketshare, a fix like this would have tremendous positive effects in web dev.

I certainly did complain! And I'm sure I'll do it again if the new features aimed to supplant the old ones are worse.

If you search anything about React now, 90% of the docs are hook-based. Beginners of React in 2025 will be guided to use a default pattern which has worse runtime footprint and adds a whole suite of new tool-specific coding guidelines ("rules of hook"). After years with it, I struggle to see what it has added in terms of building front-end SPas, yet the pattern is now the default for all using React.

React is almost 12 years old and has dominated frontend development for almost a decade. I'd bet most JS backend projects still use Express as the webserver, and it's even older than React.

Can we please retire this meme? It's stale and adds nothing to the conversation.

Yes thanks to React we can finally retire this meme. It was very true before react became dominant though.