[aurareturn]

I was a tech lead and managed a massive project (multiple billions of page views per year) that did a complete rewrite with React in 2014-2015.

React was complete shit back then - especially the first load speed. It was not ready for "real" production. We basically built an internal framework on top of React for things like server side rendering (which no one did with React back then), above the fold loading optimization, developer experience, devOps on top of React. We basically built Next.js internally.

So no. It was not production ready for real performance-based websites. Next.js made it significantly better as soon as it came out.

[meiraleal]

React was a terrible idea for a static page in 2014-2015 and is an even worse idea for a static SSR page + hydration in 2023. React back in 2014 was devised to be a performant way to create SPAs. Of course it wouldn't be good to use it as if it was PHP. It is still a bad idea.