[bluelightning2k]

Strongly recommend React-query (now Tanstack Query). ~50% of those useEffect and useState hooks are simply loading data or tracking loading states, mutation state, etc. This really improves with Tanstack Query.

Even better is to get Tanstack Query for free with type-safe backend in T3 stack.

Hard to overstate how much the symptoms described in this thread can improve simply from this.

[unconed]

In my experience React codebases turn into this mess for two reasons:

- front-end devs don't know how to think declaratively and think in terms of state transitions instead of realizing intent

- back-end devs build a classic REST-like API which provides zero affordances to drive a proper reactive front-end.

React-query is a good solution to the wrong problem. It's basically an elaborate and ornate footgun that allows you to stretch guess-based cache invalidation to its limits. Each piece of data has to be tagged with front-end only query keys, and cache invalidation requires you to re-implement and repeat your business logic optimistically in all the individual `onMutate` and `onSettled` handlers.

The actual problem to be solved is how to reliably sync data to a front-end and mutate it safely. Doing this well requires you to architect your data so it is syncable in the first place. You should separate sources of truth from derived data, you should use uniform APIs for CRUD manipulation, you should probably version your records, you should express mutations as universal patches, and so on.

Cache invalidation should only require substituting one globally addressable record with another one, and/or telling the front-end to refetch it from the source. If you are doing complex data surgery or traversals, you're doing it wrong, because that's what the reactive rendering is supposed to do for you. Anything else is a trap for juniors.

[blandblender]

> front-end devs don't know how to think declaratively and think in terms of state transitions instead of realizing intent

There is a thing among park rangers where “if people are taking this shortcut despite the signs and fences, then it’s the trail that’s wrong, not the people”.

More software engs should think this way instead of “educating harder should solve incompetence”.

It’s not that people are incompetent. The trail is wrong.

[unconed]

We've lost a giant chunk of the lore that made desktop great, and the average developer has no idea how to begin making e.g. an undo/redo system even if they have 10 years of experience and use one everyday.

Yes, the problem is the devs. They don't even understand how applications work.

[rdsedmundo]

I like this perspective, I added something similar in the original post on Reddit. The problem here has to be React and not 80%+ (sample) of the software engineers that use it.