[throwaway284534]

I hope that I’m not the only one who feels the anger emanating from these sort of blog posts. It’s stuff like the Qwik developers claiming things like “Hydration is pure overhead” as if it’s the mathematical proof that keeps their reality from crumbling. It’s the same thing on YouTube with people like Theo, gnashing their teeth at how Tailwind is incredible; You’re objectively stupid for not liking what I like; You’re using it wrong; You’re a not as smart as me; I drew you as the Soyjak and me as the Chad. Please won’t somebody tell me that I’m cutting edge?!

I really wish these people would pick up a history book. Unlike back-end developers, whose worth is intrinsically recognized as necessary, front-end development was lowly micro-managed job that must simultaneously keep up with customer expectations in a variety of formats while also rendering whatever slop passes for a REST API. React’s adoption was a combination of talented marketing and a genuine empathy for the frustrations of a 2010s web developer. They gave us a white-lie to pitch the idea to our managers: “It’s just the ‘V’ in ‘MVC’!”

JSX freed us from the jQuery-Rails template spaghetti. A quiet revolution soon followed and everyone’s been butthurt ever since.

Look — Server-side templates, especially the “stringly” typed variety, are a demonic chimera suitable only for depraved alchemists. There’s no type-safety, no IDE references. You’re in Hokey Pokey Hell — we start with a string, now we’re interpolating, back again, now once more deeper and let’s really put your editor’s syntax highlighter to the test!

It’s no surprise that stringly typed tools like HTMX and Tailwind are so deeply admired by mid-career developers who are frustrated by their lack of experience and eager to prove their talent. That’s all very normal and healthy, but the problem isn’t that React is too complex. Building software as team is a complex task of communication, and pretending to be illiterate doesn’t make the hard words any less difficult to read.

There’s most definitely room for improvement in React, and the team at Svelte demonstrated that you could have your state and skip the boilerplate too. Svelte’s compiler is a genius move and unfortunately for them, React’s upcoming v19 will commodify their complement.

It’s never been about replacing React — it’s about empathizing with developers and making it easier to work together.

[jakubmazanec]

I generally agree (that the React isn't the main culprit), but what does Tailwind have to do with templating? It's still just CSS classes, but with specific names. Also, I bet you could have strongly typed class name strings using TypeScript's template literal type somehow.

[throwaway284534]

The gist is something like a new cohort of front-end developers and some begrudging back-end folks who never actually learned how anything worked are now trying to inscribe their influence as the new smart people with tools like Tailwind and HTMX.

Wanting to prove yourself isn’t a problem. It’s actually a sign that a developer is starting to form their own opinions. But it becomes toxic when the primary motivation comes from a desire to appear smart instead of actually solving a problem.

You’re absolutely right about typed classes and that’s how React Native does it. Writing and debugging CSS is hard for many of the same reasons that string-based templates exhibit. IMO the developers who push Tailwind are looking through the wrong end of the telescope. CSS is challenging because it’s a combination of declarative aesthetic UI and imperative state management. Choosing to represent that complexity with Tailwind guarantees what could have be a temporary ignorance into a more permanent crutch that retains the same faults of the underlying abstraction, tragically opting out of any of the benefits of embracing the system. Modern CSS is pretty great and learning how it works pays endless dividends.

[jakubmazanec]

> Choosing to represent that complexity with Tailwind guarantees what could have be a temporary ignorance into a more permanent crutch that retains the same faults of the underlying abstraction, tragically opting out of any of the benefits of embracing the system.

I think you maybe don't understand what Tailwind actually does. The only abstraction is its "language" that is used to generate the list of class names you can then use to style elements, but that's not really an abstraction, because in the end it's not that different from using something like BEM and then having to remember project-specific classes. But with Tailwind, it's not specific to a single project. And you always have to understand CSS and how it works anyway.

[crabmusket]

> Server-side templates, especially the “stringly” typed variety, are a demonic chimera suitable only for depraved alchemists

I couldn't agree more with this. Components and TSX are a much nicer way to build UI trees, even on the backend.