[strogonoff]

This is a friendly PSA that you don’t need to know or care about reducers, thunks, sagas, Redux, Flux, Next, React Native, React Native for Web, CRA, etc. in order to simply use React productively. Despite the humongous ecosystem with elaborate architectures and some slow or footgun-enabling implementations that’s grown on top of it, React itself is still a relatively small and lightweight library. A couple of lines is still pretty much all it takes to get from some pure HTML to working reactive rendering on the client. (I’d still do that on a new project—it’s a good opportunity to see what’s best from first principles today, as opposed to when you started a project last.)

The most radical addition since the early days are functional components and hooks, which are not mandatory to use (class-based components are considered “legacy”, but aren’t actually deprecated). Another one is RSC, and you need to care about those even less (though they can come in handy in some scenarios).

Okay, there was one more somewhat significant change under the hood: in 0.14 they’ve made React more of a general-purpose library, splitting DOM-related specifics into ReactDOM. This separation can’t come without some overhead, so it’s unlikely React would ever going to be the most performant for the Web. (Last time I looked, Preact was faster—they did abandon that layering and went with the coupled architecture.) However, that didn’t magically turn React into a slow bloated framework—but it did enable a variety of interesting non-Web applications such as rendering native apps, rendering on embedded LCDs, etc., where you can use React core as a standalone renderer with your own reconciler instead of ReactDOM.