[lucidone]

Front end development doesn't have to be awful, particularly with how much JavaScript the language has improved alongside browser APIs. React made sense at one point because the abstractions it employed were common in other contexts: lifecycle events (intentionally avoiding the "hook" word here) are present pretty much everywhere in programming abstractions (on initialization, on deinitialization, on update, and so forth). These were aptly named "onComponentThing"s and grokable.

Hooks, and particularly useEffect, ruined it for me. I have given up trying to understand why changing button states or presenting modals has become so obtuse and frustrating. I don't care about updating my react-router and rewriting it again for the third or fourth or whatever time. I don't want another new testing library, another new "best practice", or another repeated mistake in the reinventing-the-wheel-cycle the React community seems obsessed with.

It's all so exhausting. I write Rails now with erb templates and some dumb javascript to toggle modals and change button colours. It's not cool but at least I can understand it six months later.

[shipscode]

I'm in the same boat. Redux + Pre-Hook React was very legible & straightforward... Post hooks React is strong on theory but weak on substance, and I've gone to just jQuery and Python for my latest project.

I did migrate my last project the barebones JS MVP -> React and regretted it immensely. It took about a month and didn't provide enough value to make it worth it.

[seattle_spring]

Complex Higher Order Components are some of the least readable and least straightforward code I've ever been exposed to.

[datavirtue]

I tried to learn React during the transition. Thankfully I had the authority to nope-out after trying to build a few apps with it and running into nothing but tons of arguing online when trying to search for help on what I thought would be an easy five minute task: to find out the best way to track state in my app.

[shipscode]

Yeeeep. The arguing by clout chasers was the worst part.

[kaba0]

Hooks have been available for 4 years now. Also, take a look at the official site: https://react.dev/learn

It is literally a few pages and you can be ready to go with it. Especially that react didn’t drop backwards compatibility. I honestly don’t get all this negativity. There used to be a new framework in FE circles each month, but for several years now the churn has slowed to a halt.

Also, it literally just rerenders the state again if it changed. That’s it. There is hardly an easier model to exist.