[deckard1]

Frameworks like React aren't the real headache today, for me at least. It's all the machinery of web development. Webpack, babel, polyfills, various CSS transforms and ways to utilize CSS (sass, less, CSS modules, CSS inline, the list is a mile long).

My organization has tossed so many manhours into maintaining webpack and our build that you could recreate our entire site numerous times over in a bog standard LAMP stack with a fraction of the headcount. The cost of a modern web dev stack is no joke. And for what, I might ask? The UX of a single page app is atrocious. The canonical example of SPA done right is Google Maps. Ever tried Google Maps on a mobile browser? There is a reason the native app still exists.

SPA is, at best, a desktop-first experience that we're trying to force into a mobile-first world we live. It's nearly the definition of insanity, what we're trying to do with the web today.

In the process of everyone following Google and Facebook, we are also destroying the essential ingredient of the web: links. Everything is a walled garden with internal state and incredibly fragile external links (if any at all). Pinterest and Quora, everywhere. What will define the web of the 2010-2020+ is that everything is broken and everything sucks.

[mbanerjeepalmer]

At the risk of sounding naive: what's the alternative?

[ithrow]

server-side-rendered HTMl with JS sprinkled (yes, that sprinkled JS can contain React). Works for most web apps.