[a_wild_dandan]

React is a view library. It deliberately focused on doing one thing, and doing it well -- declaratively painting the view layer. It's not comparable to more general/monolithic frontend development solutions like Angular/Vue/etc. Those tools have far different scopes. So of course React doesn't prescribe routing, state management, project styling solutions, build bundling, or any other frequently lamented "missing" features. They're only omissions to folks misunderstanding React's use case.

Now there are solutions comparable to Vue/etc which use React -- Next.js, Create React App, etc. Comparisons, tradeoffs, and criticisms are totally fair there. Just don't blame React for churn in third party implementations of features outside of its purview.

As a side note, I love that React is so narrowly scoped. It lets the community build on, experiment with, and coalesce around amazing solutions to other big features outside of React's scope. That Darwinian approach has created broad front end solutions that to me are a joy to use compared to similarly featured frameworks like Angular.

[mhoad]

It doesn’t actually do it well and has been totally out of step with how modern browsers work for years now. It’s old and poorly made technology. The fact that it chose to do one thing and it can’t even get that right says a lot about it.

Sadly, for reasons that remain a mystery to me it’s one of those things like Apple or crypto where some of its loudest fans have decided to make it a part of their identity rather than a tool they enjoy using.

[ratww]

React actually does more than "one thing", and it does those things quite well, actually: First, it provides a relatively performant diffing mechanism that gives a happy medium between manual diffing and templating; it also provides reusable components that are easy to make, easy to maintain and are able to easily hold local data and have an ergonomic API; finally it also provides a sane of of passing data between layers.

Other frameworks have adopted some of those concepts in different ways, and it works quite well. Other technologies have other ways of solving the same problems, and they also work! Of course, it is absolutely not perfect and doesn't solve "all problems", but that's how mature technologies generally are.

Modern browsers have tried to provide a competing technology with WebComponents, but despite being native to the platform and embraced en masse not only by browser makers but by large companies, it hasn't taken off like React. Please take a time to reflect as to why something that is "there" isn't as widely used as something that requires a 50kb library to even start. And no, it's not a conspiracy, nor it is marketing. There are very good technical reasons for that.

About the "fans" part: please look at the mirror. You seem to be projecting a lot here. People use React and other similar libraries because it gets the job done. A lot of your posts seem to be about competing technologies, or are anti-Apple, or anti-something. Criticism is perfectly fine, but you're the one making hating something part of your identity and the projection is blurring your ability to empathise with what others are saying.