I don't have much of an opinion on React as a library, although they do use it for our web frontend at my work. However something I noticed in the past when I was doing some web dev work out of AUS was that some websites would have incredibly buggy behavior. Keep in mind this was around 10 years ago so some things might have changed. After doing some debugging it turned out that some of the libraries were fairly large, and they didn't have co-located CDN's in the area. The specific ones in that were jQuery. That caused some of the JS libraries to not fully download, or just some of them to time out.

That's a mostly fixable problem with having something like a pipeline that minifies the libraries and has them being downloaded from somewhere closer to your users, or putting them on a better CDN, but a lot of people don't have the time/option/money to do that. It was pretty obvious in that instance since a lot of that was wordpress development at the time and things like plugins/extensions usually don't bother. When I was doing similar development in the US I never saw any of that kind of behavior since so many libraries at the time were hosted on the West Coast where I lived. Also most developers I know aren't super resource limited on their hardware (desktop/laptop or mobile), which might be a factor.

I'm not sure if this is what people are referring to, but just something to consider.

One example: once I tried to buy a train ticket and it was impossible due to my outdated iOS.

I'm talking about 2-5 input forms, autocomplete, and calendars, things that can be done even with HTML 4.0, with zero front-end frameworks, and that will work this way for decades. However, there was React producing some error because of my old browser, and preventing me from buying the ticket.

I believe vital services, such as public digital platforms, must have the lowest possible system/browser requirements and work on any possible device, even if I use a 10-year-old device.

While there are knowledgeable people that dislike React, and there are things to criticize about React (what normal people would call trade-offs), A large swath of React hate comes from "Fullstack Engineers" that are actually Backend engineers.

They barely do Frontend, and when they do, they have no idea how the underlying tech works. They literally don't know what React is. They don't know what it does. They don't know it's not just for SPAs. They think it includes a bunch of shit that it doesn't. They hear React and think "I don't know what mounting is, but I programmed once in NextJS and it was fucking awful".

So we get seething comments from people who get frustrated with a build system, or with "breaking changes" even though old versions of React work the exact same way. It's a client-side rendering library, why do you care about breaking changes? Or we get people swearing that Vue is magnitudes better even though they both work roughly the same with minor differences.

And I get frustrated, because I know these people otherwise would've slapped JQuery on a website and written a horrific CSS selector that will break in 4 days when someone else tries to restructure the HTML. Because we see abuse most visibly in popular tech.

I use it all at work. JQuery, Vue, React, Svelte, HTMX. I can't say I'd shy away from any of it, but I can't say I have a massive preference either.

>> Now it doesn't.

Really? Serious question.

Yes

yes

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