[murukesh_s]

React's (or other SPA frameworks like Vue's) complexity is much higher than it should have is probably because of the tooling (Babel, Webpack, NPM etc) and additional build process required even for a simple hello world app. That coupled with the rapid revision of the underlying ECMAScript standard and the race by developers and framework authors to adopt them causing further chaos.

Another issue was the rapid deprecation of age old JQuery plugins and the lack of equivalent plugins in the React landscape causing confusion whether you should build it yourself or not etc. I had hoped WebComponents somehow got standardized as the underlying architecture for SPAs, just so that the plugin/widgets wont get fragmented further, but it looks like it wont be happening anytime soon.

[ng12]

> React's (or other SPA frameworks like Vue's) complexity is much higher than it should have is probably because of the tooling (Babel, Webpack, NPM etc) and additional build process required even for a simple hello world app.

I wouldn't frame it as excess complexity, I would frame it as power. My problem is not writing simple hello world apps, it's writing and maintaining very large production applications with 5 other developers. Two years ago I took a week to really learn the tooling stack and it's paid dividends ever since.

[olavgg]

We are 10 developers just using vanilla Javascript here. No mess, and a joy to work with. We use good old design patterns like observer, proxy, composite and so on. We also use inheritance and template literals a lot.

The key is good documentation, having an onboard plan for new developers, keeping things stupid simple and stop being bleeding edge. We want our code base to just work, so we can focus more on new features and less on maintenance.

I'm planning on writing a deeper blog post this year about why and how we feel is a good structured simple way to do frontend development. I believe there are several frustrated frontend developers out there that just want to make their life easier but currently all the arguments they find just favor 'React'....

Our whole Javascript codebase is 50k + lines. But the clients only fetch what is needed.

[ng12]

> joy to work with

Color me skeptical. React is quite literally the only framework I've ever found to be enjoyable (and maintainable).

[Can_Not]

> React's (or other SPA frameworks like Vue's) complexity is much higher than it should have is probably because of the tooling (Babel, Webpack, NPM etc) and additional build process required even for a simple hello world app.

This is false or misleading. There is complexity, yes, but those tools abstract it away and simplify everything. Then they have configs with great documentation for when you need to deviate from a default or add a plugin. Next, these things are pre-configured for you. "More complex than it should be" is when you try to reinvent the power of these tools for literally no coherent reason.