Why React over rails front-end? It seems like it adds undue complication. What’s the real benefit? Basecamp works great and it’s a rails front end. Rails make full stack development pretty easy.
You can have the best of both worlds and use webpacker to mix React or VueJS into the Rails frontend where it makes sense, eg complex forms or widgets. Many webapps are not Facebookish and don't need to be SPA blobs, with all the additional complexity, SEO and accessibility costs.
It really depends on the application. If you're making something that has a highly interactive UI, then React is a great tool for that. It doesn't have to be all or nothing though, you can use Rails server side rendering with React components for the complicated stuff. Basecamp is not a fair comparison, they use Stimulus which is their own frontend framework.
It's been a long time since I wrote or even had to look at PHP, but I have done work in PHP. I use React constantly. I do not see any similarities between the two, like, at all.
"If you're at all familiar with the history of React, there's actually some amount of truth to this. React grew out of an internal PHP extension at Facebook called XHP. See the recent post describing React's history at https://facebook.github.io/react/blog/2016/09/28/our-first-5... for more details."
"That said, the parallels only go so far. PHP is frequently rather unstructured, while React lends itself to some very specific structures. I don't think I'd necessarily say that PHP typically involves "recursively breaking down parts of the page". But sure, some similarities. (Then again, just about anything that involves template-ish work has some similarities... )"