[onion2k]

Having used the internet for 25 years I can confidently say most React apps are far smaller than most jQuery apps, mainly because jQuery apps didn't use compilers or bundlers. Hell, most didn't even use minifiers.

Even ignoring that, React app sizes are getting better. Modern React apps (basically since 16.7) that are written with things like Suspense, lazy, and hooks are usually pretty small. Writing functional components and composing your app pushes you to write less code. Plus React gets things like code splitting for free with webpack if you use lazy, so the first page load only downloads things that are actually needed to get to interactive.

No doubt some less considerate developers will still manage to write giant apps that take ages to get started, but they don't have to. Bloated apps are a function of developer's choices rather than React (or any other JS framework) forcing the apps to be bloated.

[extra88]

> Modern React apps (basically since 16.7) that are written with things like Suspense, lazy, and hooks are usually pretty small.

Come on, 16.7 was released in December and 16.8, with stable Hooks, was last week! It's interesting that React has added these features and it bodes well for the future but you can't claim capabilities that have only existed for the a few months is what constitutes "modern." React's pace of adoption has been remarkable but that also means there's a lot of code that already exists that isn't going to be changed right away to take advantage of these features.

[korm]

These features existed in the form of 3rd party libraries like react-loadable for code splitting and recompose for hooks. I don't know any serious React devs who haven't used code splitting in the past few years, and recompose was very popular as well. We just have a canonical way of doing these things now.

[barbecue_sauce]

> Modern React apps (basically since 16.7)

So like, a month ago?

[arcticwombat]

Didn't you know?

If it isn't less than a month old, it's "the old way" :)