Redux has very little to do with React. It's not bound to React, you can use it with any framework, or without a framework. You can't 'destroy React' by stopping dev on a library that's not a part of it.
Plus redux is still maintained. You can still use it if you want to. In my opinion there are better options that plain Redux available now (some based on Redux eg RTK or Redux-Query, and some not eg Jotai, tRPC, react-query). RTK is even recommended by the Redux team.
The fact Dan chose to work on other things is great. He's a talented dev and it's good that other projects benefit from his knowledge.
Hi, I'm the current primary Redux maintainer, and have been since 2016, when Dan handed the maintainer keys to myself and Tim Dorr.
I'm actually genuinely _not_ sure what you mean here.
For clarity, the timeline was:
- Summer 2015: Dan and Andrew created Redux
- November 2015: Dan got hired at FB to work on React
- Jan-Mar 2016: I got involved writing some Redux docs, and Dan gave me commit rights
- Summer 2016: Dan, who was now busy working on React, gave me and Tim full ownership of the project.
He's had some advisory thoughts and suggestions since then (most notably a couple tweaks to our proposed React-Redux hooks API in early 2019), but has otherwise _not_ been involved with Redux's development since 2016.
Honestly, this has been a _good_ thing. Based on my conversations with Dan, he most likely would have mostly left Redux's design and API as it was in 2016-ish: very minimal, and requiring _lots_ of handwritten boilerplate code to do anything useful.
Instead, I came up with the idea for our Redux Toolkit package that wraps the Redux core and provides a better API for writing standard Redux logic, worked with others to build that, wrote the documentation, shipped it, wrote new tutorials using RTK as the default, designed and shipped React-Redux hooks, and did the work to encourage folks to use the newer Redux APIs. For that matter, React-Redux version 5, which had some major perf improvements, only happened because a user offered to PR the rewrite they'd done for themselves, and I worked to oversee that effort and make sure it covered all the edge cases.
I honestly don't think Dan would have done any of that, both because he would have been splitting his efforts between working on React as his day job and Redux on the side, and also because I don't think he would have felt the need to push Redux forward and improve its usage patterns.
So, the actual history _was_ for the best. Dan got to focus on React, and I was able to pick up Redux and modernize it.
Plus redux is still maintained. You can still use it if you want to. In my opinion there are better options that plain Redux available now (some based on Redux eg RTK or Redux-Query, and some not eg Jotai, tRPC, react-query). RTK is even recommended by the Redux team.
The fact Dan chose to work on other things is great. He's a talented dev and it's good that other projects benefit from his knowledge.