[somatic]

jQuery: 88KB, standard everywhere, one entity responsible for all of it, people know what it is and what it does, if it breaks you know what went wrong and who to blame.

Literally anything built with NPM: megabytes? tens of megabytes? in size, totally inscrutable, code being pulled in from hundreds of megabytes of code in tens of thousands of packages from hundreds or thousands of people of unknown (and unknowable) competence and trustworthiness, if it breaks not only do you not know who to blame but you probably have literally no idea what wrong.

Yeah, jQuery was probably better.

[Cthulhu_]

It Depends, as always. The problem React was originally solving was that DOM updates cause re-rendering which can be slow; jquery (usually) works directly in the DOM, so applications heavy in updates don't perform well.

So initially an equivalent React and jQuery app would have React look a lot faster, due to smart / batched DOM updates. However, because React is so fast it made people create apps differently.

As always in software development, an application will grow to fill up available performance / memory. If people were to develop on intentionally constricted computers they would do things differently.

(IIRC, at Facebook they'll throttle the internet on some days to 3g speeds to force this exact thing. Tangentially related, at Netflix (iirc) they have Chaos Monkey which randomly shuts down servers and causes problems, so errors are a day to day thing instead of an exception they've not foreseen).

[enlyth]

That's a problem with the npm ecosystem.

React is just so, so much nicer to work with. It's easy to be dismissive if you've never had to develop UIs with jQuery and didn't experience yourself the transition to React which is a million times better in terms of developer experience.

I feel like people that don't build UIs themselves think of them too much in a completely functional way as in "it's just buttons and form inputs that do X", and forget about the massive complexity, edge cases, aesthetic requirements, accessibility, rendering on different viewports, huge statefulness, and so on.

[engineeringwoke]

Old is better is just not true here. React is a dream. Synthetic eventing, batched updates, and DOM node re-use are so good. I rolled my own DOM renderer recently and remembered a lot of problems from the past that I would not like to re-visit.

[somatic]

Yes, you're absolutely right: React itself is great. But React is part of the NPM ecosystem; try using one without the other.

And then if you're still feeling cocky try finding someone else who uses one without the other.

[engineeringwoke]

Write your own framework-like code with just jQuery and watch it turn into a pile of mush. React is many things, but it is absolutely better than jQuery or Backbone. People always mis-use new technology; that isn't React's fault.

[jiofih]

My whole argument is that _it is_. I don’t know why we are comparing to jQuery though, they are not replacements for each other.