React Won by Default – and It's Killing Front End Innovation

Re:React Won by Default – and It's Killing Front End Innovation by giveita on Monday September 15, 2025 @05:56PM (#45255451)

Maybe us backenders help. If I need to do front end I learn as little as possible. React does the job. It could have been Angular that ended up being in the boring throne, and I would have said just use Angular. Just use what the world uses!

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Re:React Won by Default – and It's Killing Front End Innovation by dylan604 on Monday September 15, 2025 @07:36PM (#45256260)

I'm a backender that writes UI PoCs to test the backend where the PoC gets pushed to prod. I just write custom JS updating HTML/CSS elements directly. No frameworks. I've been told it's a nightmare to deal with later, but it makes perfect sense to me. Not once have I ever claimed to be a UI person. That's just way too close to the user for my liking.

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Re:React Won by Default – and It's Killing Front End Innovation by ForHackernews on Monday September 15, 2025 @06:00PM (#45255486)

Angular is so much nicer and more batteries-included than React. React somehow manages to be massively yet incomplete: add a router, add state management, add react-hook-form...

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Re:React Won by Default – and It's Killing Front End Innovation by ChromaticPanic on Monday September 15, 2025 @07:06PM (#45256067)

That's why it's so good. You can pick what you want instead of being told what to do.

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Re:React Won by Default – and It's Killing Front End Innovation by jiggawatts on Monday September 15, 2025 @08:25PM (#45256606)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paradox_of_Choice

In practice, at scale, in an ecosystem instead of a toy project, excessive choice is counterintuitively a bad thing.

It's hugely beneficial to have common ground and shared interfaces when integrating code from third parties, or collaborating across multiple teams.

> You can pick

A golden rule of large enterprise is that there is no "you".

As soon as there are two people working independently, not to mention different business units or teams, different choices will be made. Incompatible choices.

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Re:React Won by Default – and It's Killing Front End Innovation by cheesekunator on Monday September 15, 2025 @06:36PM (#45255803)

This is very true and almost nobody sees it...

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Re:React Won by Default – and It's Killing Front End Innovation by spartanatreyu on Monday September 15, 2025 @08:25PM (#45256603)

Angular is used a lot in enterprise apps/services when they need a low risk one-way to do things (e.g. Apple's App Store developer portal).

React is used in enterprise when teams need to move fast and break things (e.g. Microsoft Edge's UI after switching from Trident/Spartan/EdgeHTML to Chromium) and tend to be replaced with something else when dev teams / managers realise that they need to rebuild it anyway just to keep it maintained and/or gain more performance. (e.g. Edge "WebUI 2.0" moving their browser UI from react to web components)

Vue is used a lot in Asian enterprise markets.

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