I’d love to see these narratives actually demonstrated in tests via blog posts. I suspect it’s more a demonstration of human memory and perception than it is of reality.
Well, you can go back and look at the original blog posts announcing React? I assume they're still on the internet somewhere. React was a pretty massive speedup over the portions of Facebook and Instagram's frontends that it replaced and they showed off their benchmarks a lot early on. That library had very little in common with the thing now known as React, though.
Enshittification is when a company offers an amazing product, but once they have a hold over the market, they make it worse and squeeze customers. It works because customers are so locked in and there are market forces stopping them from switching to a competitor.
Frontend development is not being enshittified. We have so many frameworks that you can switch to if React isn't your cup of tea. Hell, you can use Astro and use React, Vue, Svlete, etc and it renders to HTML. HTMX is a new framework and easy to pivot too since React devs know JSX.
React is also silently borrowing ideas from Svelte and Solid.js (and those were inspired from React) so all these frameworks are improving each other without even knowing it.
This is what I don't really understand when people are airing their grievances. What exactly is the problem? You can absolutely write webpages and software the same way you could 5, 10, 20, etc. years ago. There's absolutely nothing stopping you from making a VanillaJS website or JQuery or whatever. Nothing went away. There's just more choices.
> There's absolutely nothing stopping you from making a VanillaJS website or JQuery or whatever.
There’s nothing stopping me doing that on a solo project but frontend web dev is increasingly a monoculture around React so when you’re talking about making this decision in the workplace you end up using React whether it’s the right idea or not.
I worked at a place that ended up using React because a senior manager was concerned about hiring and wanted to use something we’d be able to easily hire for. It wasn’t actually a good tech fit but that wasn’t the priority. And in many ways he wasn’t wrong. There’s a mini-generation of developers that have only experienced front end development though the lens of React and have barely if ever used, say, raw CSS.
Their grip is not with React per se, it's with the pressure to use new, updated features. Hooks was like this when they were introduced. People were so used to using lifecycle functions and then hooks became the "official" way. Users could still use classes and lifecycle functions, but since it was not the new "preferred" way, devs had the pressure to update old perfectly working code.
We're seeing the same with RSC. Many Next.js users are updating their apps to use the new App Router, but I've seen many just stick to the Pages Router since it just fucking works for their app and RSC has improvements, but none they care about.
I've got applications that are years behind in React. I actually felt the opposite was true: I could upgrade React without having to change my code at all. And even more awesome: I could gradually use new features without touching any existing code.
I wonder if some of it is a perception issue: Everyone, including the instruction manuals, Stack Overflow, and search results, are talking less and less about the way I do things, and more about these new ways.
Kind of like swimming against the current back when JQuery/Angular were the dominant ones and suggesting React would get you laughed out of the room? How nobody would care if you could use React because every business was using and only hiring for JQuery devs?
The cycle continues. People acting like the [current popular thing] is the problem are missing the forest for the trees.
I think if you let what lives in your toolbox define you as a developer, you’re selling yourself short.
If you’re a decent engineer, learning a new library should be the boring part. It’s not like any of these libraries are introducing highly specific conceptual paradigms.
To me, enshittification also includes the feature bloat that comes from product managers and designers having to justify their salaries, which slowly turns things that were once lean and elegant into sluggish UI goop.
And that perfectly describes what is happening to frontend development.
> We have so many frameworks that you can switch to if React isn't your cup of tea.
Yes, that is what I was alluding to by calling it a "revolving cycle": Dominant Framework A is a bloated mess -> Framework B appears, it's lean and a joy to use -> Developers switch to Framework B, it becomes dominant -> Framework B gets enshittified into a bloated mess -> Framework C appears, it's lean and a joy to use
Happens everywhere in software, but in web frontend dev, it happens a lot more quickly.