[antris]

>You probably could, but did you? Oh, wait, you didn't. The hot tech du jour when React was released were knockout.js and backbone.js.

I did. It's kind of funny to hear that you cannot even entertain the idea that people actually did declarative UIs before React with plain old vanilla JS, because that was my bread and butter back in the day. That's precisely how I did frontend until React came along, and so did many others. We sometimes sprinkled in some CoffeeScript to get nicer function syntax, before () => {} and babel existed, but it wasn't necessary if we wanted to avoid a compile step.

Just because some frameworks were prevalent at the time didn't mean that everyone used them. Large portion of seasoned developers rejected all frameworks and still do today. They had shot themselves in the foot with MVC/"trying to do everything" -frameworks enough times to learn that not all answers come from a single framework that encompasses your whole application. This is nothing new or esoteric, and still today a good lesson to learn for new developers. Instead many people continue to use "the standard" framework, fighting against it when it fails to fit the domain logic of their app, and waiting for a new framework to arrive to save the day. Frameworks have gotten much more flexible about this today, but React wasn't anything revolutionary on the framework side of things.

It's not as simple as "React bad/React good". A framework/library can be good in certain aspects and bad in others. I loved React when it came out, because of the VDOM. Wasn't a fan of everything else though, and especially not a fan of how it was used as "the new standard framework to tightly couple your application into". This is not a contradiction, it's just non black-and-white thinking.

[dmitriid]

> I did. It's kind of funny to hear that you cannot even entertain the idea that people actually did declarative UIs before React with plain old vanilla JS

By you I meant "collective you". I don't care what individual developers did that no one knows about.

> Just because some frameworks were prevalent at the time didn't mean that everyone used them.

    define: prevalent

    1 : generally or widely accepted, practiced, or favored : widespread

    2 : being in ascendancy : dominant

> Large portion .. upto ... flexible about this today

Bears little to no relevance on the discussion

> React wasn't anything revolutionary on the framework side of things.

Except, it was. It upended the prevalent way of doing things and ushered in a new prevalent way of doing things.

    define: reovultionary

    1 c : constituting or bringing about a major or fundamental change

I did bring about a fundamental change: the prevalent way of doing things on the web changed.

> It's not as simple as "React bad/React good".

Of course it's not. But we're not discussing whether it's bad or good.

> it's just non black-and-white thinking.

So far your "non black and white thinking" is "everything React has was done better befroe React, but I can't show anything to prove this except some disparate things that are both complex and esoteric, and I can also go on a prolonged discourse about how some developers don't use frameworks and may have done things a la React before React".

[antris]

I already told you what I did and several developers did before React to combat the same problems the React addressed, but somehow you seem to dismiss all of it. If you don't want to believe it, that's fine. I know what kind of code I wrote before React, your ramblings won't change it. Have a good day.

[atatatat]

This disagreement is related to discussing different things:

What devs can implement on their own beyond frameworks, and what frameworks mean to how the community as a whole operates.

"Defaults matter."