[varrock]

> many people don't understand any better why or how React is good and when it's bad to use...

Your comment was very insightful, but I feel like you've left me on a cliffhanger. I'm someone who got into the industry right when React was reaching enterprise levels, so I missed out on what came before it. I got my job, was told to learn React, and have gone from there.

Is there any way you might be able to expand on the problems you were solving with your declarative approach, why it was useful, and how you think React should be used in modern day web development?

[antris]

One these problems usually:

- application is in one state and the UI is in another state

- jQuery operations mutating the DOM causing weird edge cases after several user interactions

- the template language (handlebars, mustache etc.) was getting in the way because it lacked the expressivity of javascript

- application state was split all over the place between Models, Views and Controllers. instead, if you put as much state as possible in a single place in your application, it's much easier to just create declarative functions that take in an immutable state and output a DOM node object: `(state object) => DOMNode`

Right now I'd use React only for projects that require it as legacy or as a part of a framework. If you want to get things done quick, Next.js is pretty good framework for greenfield projects that uses React under the hood and I don't mind it being there too much. But similar things to React can be achieved with Svelte or Lit without having to ship and manage a VDOM implementation or JSX with its quirks (e.g. className).

So in summary, I'd stay away from all features of React other than VDOM, and even skip that if possible. And as a general rule, don't use any frameworks unless you can say why your project specifically really needs it. Surprisingly much can be done with basic HTML, JS and CSS. People who say "just use X" are trying to force simple answers to a field that is inherently complex and needs good judgment on which tools to use and when not to use them.

[thealig]

I have experienced working on a messy application codebase (jQuery + Knockout.js) which was 7-8 years old and seemingly was hastily made by on contract of another company. Had to refactor it to ES6 (dynamic imports) -needless to say it was a big pain with unpredictable barely any performance improvement as compared to refactoring on another codebase.

jQuery is a good tool for simple one page applications but not designed for complex web apps. It is harder to code cleanly in it as compared to React.