| > React is bad at "static" content Of course, it's a view library meant for dynamic content, that's the whole point of React. That then people who learned React and try to build other things with it, isn't the fault of React. If it is such a pain in the ass, why not use an alternative that is less pain in the ass? No one is forced to use React, and if you have a bunch of developers that use React/JSX just because, maybe it's time to have a sit down and talk about alternatives. > I dont see any one screaming about the fact that JSX is the same as PHP mixed in HTML Because it's arguably not the same. JSX is syntatic sugar for "functions as views" using built-in JS types. Creating an element is `React.createElement('h1', {}, 'foobar')`, so it's actual JS. What people did (including myself) back in the day of PHP development was having templates as individual files on disk, parse them as strings and then try to "make them come alive", that paradigm is very different from templates-with-JS. If anything, what we did with PHP before is much more similar to what VueJS is doing today, with actual "templates", than code-as-views that React/JSX offers. > but the web is not a SPA, a lot of it doesn't need to be a SPA Agree, developers tend to learn something and then try to shoehorn it into everything, even when they actually needed a screwdriver instead of a hammer. I'm probably guilty of the same sometimes too, but mostly just for fun and giggles. But you're right that many of the things we see today as SPAs, don't really have to be SPAs at all in the first place. |
The discussions always get muddy here. React, the view library, can't directly be blamed for how people use it, its just a collection of code.
The react codebase does include quite a few features that support using it for more than just basic view rendering of dynamic content though. Hooks support async logic that really doesn't belong in the view layer, context providers get muddy quickly as they can pass around more than serializable state, and with server components react is arguably not even a view library at all.
The problem is ultimately how devs chose to use, and how to promote the use of, react. Given that the codebase also supports those use cases today though, its reasonable to me that people often peg blame on react itself.