[bakugo]

You don't need to understand how useState works if you're writing a page with a button that increments a number when pressed, from a beginner's tutorial.

As soon as you work on any remotely complex codebase, you will run into problems that require a decent mental model of the underlying "magic" to properly understand and solve. "Building sophisticated applications while understanding very little of the underlying model" is how you end up with gigantic piles of unmaintainable spaghetti code full of awful hacks, which seems to be the standard for React applications.

[lolinder]

Is this less true of Web Components?

I've worked with a lot of different tech stacks over my career and every single one of them has required understanding the internals once you start using them seriously. I haven't found React to be substantially worse for that than any other tech stack I've used.

[peebeebee]

With webcomponents you are pretty close to the “metal”. If you know how to write good vanilla JavaScript, you can take most of that knowledge into webcomponents. You only need to learn the custom components lifecycle, and shadowDOM, which is knowledge about web-standards. With other frameworks you need to learn template syntaxing, how state propagates, how the compiler works, etc etc. Lot of that knowledge might be obsolete in 10 years.

Which isn’t to say it can’t be worth it. Learning multiple frameworks and libraries is also very helpful to skill up because you are learning about different concepts and implementations.

[Narhem]

Another advantage of web components is the syntax is similar enough to Java (especially with JavaDocs) switching between coding a Java spring backend and a Web component based front end is doesn’t need as much of a mental context switch.