[mittermayr]

It's one thing to complain about React causing chaos, valid, but I would like to remind everyone about the absolute trainwreck we had before. Just slightly before polyfills and opinionated frameworks. Sure, spinning up a quick JavaScript-infused html file with a jQuery CDN link was probably the fastest way to get going, but structurally, on anything larger, this was a horrendous nightmare for most projects I came across. The amount of variables that ended up window. or similar, the various slight differences of JavaScript versions/engines/browsers, the trillions of home-made everyone-does-it-their-own-way solutions to standard problems (from cookies to animations, from error handling to networking).

I like it more, than I liked it in the past. It's uncool to say that, but I was so happy to see structure in the world of JavaScript.

[danielvaughn]

I agree, we can't go back. And we should acknowledge how important and transformative React was for web development. It's easy to criticize in hindsight. Now our job is to come up with something better, taking what we now know that we didn't when React first came on the scene.

[cynicalsecurity]

React doesn't define any standard ways or libraries. You can still create any sort of mess you want.

[mittermayr]

Well, React in and of itself doesn't, sure, I agree. However, if you look at React code, from the Getting started to ANY example out there, they do all have a "structure" that easily identifies it as React code and each file has an inherent structure that I can easily split up in my brain to understand what's going on. So the use of React ... comes with ... some form of often-repeated structure/patterns.

[ativzzz]

It absolutely defines a standard for what a "UI Component" is and how its behavior should be orchestrated by the APIs React provides.

What it doesn't provide is a way to manage complex state that persists beyond the scope of one component (Context isn't good enough), and every single app has state that persists beyond the scope of one component

[stevage]

>but I would like to remind everyone about the absolute trainwreck we had before.

That isn't good enough. People make the same argument about Git. "But it was so much worse before Git".

React was a useful step forward for its time, but it's not a great solution now.

[sabbaticaldev]

how are they comparable? git is still great and there is no better option

[mdhb]

Just a quick side note not that I think you are wrong here at all just pointing it out as an FYI but there is a tool currently in development called jj or jiu-jitsu which is currently implemented on top of git but exposes a totally different cli and set of workflows which people seem to think is a huge improvement over git. It’s a cool project to keep an eye on.