[SwellJoe]

I've been learning React lately, and many tutorials, even those targeted at beginners, include Redux. Many seem to be a sort-of cargo cult without any understanding of why they're using Redux, and in many cases, there's no reason to introduce Redux into the mix. I've also noticed a lot of tutorials are content marketing from companies wanting to sell bolt-on services and tools, which is pretty weird; I've never used a language/ecosystem that had so many hangers-on before. And, it leads to the same situation: "Learn React (plus these other complicated things that we want to sell you)!"

I mean, it's necessary, at some point, to see a full system that uses all the tools for delivering a real application. But, it is definitely a lot of concepts to grok at once. I actually found it most useful to see tutorials that started without even using React, and built up from first principles to what React does (given that React is conceptually very simple, this isn't so crazy...a toy version of React can be built in an hour or so, so it's perfect for a video or article; much of the complexity in React is in making it fast rather than in making it work). But, that may not be a necessary first step for people who have more frontend or reactive programming experience than I have.

[jbreckmckye]

There is a big problem with the commercialisation of React. More and more companies are using learning resources as marketing material. And now one popular JS developer has started beginning his GitHub readmes with advertisements for a paid JS course. It's a far cry from the open, guileless sharing culture of webdev 10 years ago.

[SwellJoe]

I'm somehow less bothered by the latter. Folks gotta make a living, somehow, and sometimes people have to make choices between doing OSS development or having a real job and doing a lot less of the OSS work.

But, the learning materials and marketing are the ones that bug me...especially the ones that neglect to mention that the materials cover React+product, and only mention React in the title. You might not even know it's marketing until you've read half the darned thing and the crux of the thing turns out to be "now create an account here and use this service to outsource the specific thing you googled to learn how to implement yourself". GraphQL has a lot of the same thing going on. It's like "how to draw an owl", only instead of "now draw the rest of the fucking owl", it's "now send us money every month for the rest of your app's life and we'll draw an owl for you".