[WhitneyLand]

Justin I think you are conflating a couple issues here:

  1). OSS critiques should be more polite

  2). People are stupid for not doing due diligence

First, I agree criticism should be constructive. Yet there is nothing wrong with 100 people saying here they don't like React Router and in fact such feedback is crucial for the authors and the community. Maybe you agree; but ironically the tone of your post seemed have a bit of the scorn and derision that you are asking people to avoid.

Secondly, it's already obvious people are responsible for their own projects. The motivation for stating the obvious seems to be to emphasize people should seek to blame themselves before criticizing others. Wrong. These things are orthogonal - Regardless of one's due diligence, it's perfectly acceptable, indeed beneficial, to critique OSS, when done in a productive way.

[jkkramer]

Yeah maybe. To me it feels like many in the community complain and shirk responsibility, and some stern words were needed to counterbalance that position. If the community wants stability in its projects, it needs to learn what it takes to achieve that.

[jkkramer]

Further thoughts: choosing an unstable library and then criticizing it for being unstable seems silly. There are two sides: library authors need to value things like careful design, real world testing, and backwards compatibility. Library consumers need to advocate for the same things, plus learn how to identify risk (semver isn't going to save you), and take ownership of their choices.

[lomnakkus]

> Further thoughts: choosing an unstable library and then criticizing it for being unstable seems silly.

If so many people (apparently) missed the "expect this to be unstable" bit, I wonder if it's just a question of not being signaled effectively enough on Router's home page. Which I can understand since no developer actually expects, let's say, their v3 to actually be completely revamped into a v4. If they knew ahead of time, they'd presumably just have chosen the v4 design.

I guess it's kind of catch-22. Maybe the right thing here is to explicitly say "we currently fully expect this to be stable for the foreseeable future, but cannot predict the future, and are prepared to break everything if a better design is discovered"?

EDIT: I suppose another way to alleviate the problems would be to pledge support for the previous version for a period of time... but no developer working in their spare time really wants to do that. (For very understandable reasons.)