[s6af7ygt]

> they only started to look nice when React moved to Hooks and functional components

Is this a widely held opinion? Call me crazy, but I really liked class components. It was nice to see the lifecycle stages in the actual method names, and encapsulate the behavior inside of a method block. To me that was really nice to read.

With hooks, everything is inside a function without clear delineation. The lifecycle stages are put anywhere in there with (to me) strange looking calls to useEffect and such.

Before, I used to love whipping up a quick UI in React, but since hooks I loathe doing that. I really don't want to upgrade my existing apps to newer versions. And for potential future project I'm looking for an alternative.

Perhaps I don't like it so much because I'm primarily a back and systems engineer, and only do small frontends on the side.

[mplanchard]

Hooks are awful. They’re a faux-functional interface, accessing implicit local state, with so much magic going on behind the scenes that it’s obscene. At least in class component days it was obvious which components were stateful. Now you’ve got to remember which magic hook incantation is causing your “functional” component to improperly cache state and why. I cannot for the life of me see it as an improvement in any way other than “it looks nicer,” which aligns with the top-level parent’s point.

Anyway I think react in general is kind of terrible. I’ve worked at three places whereFE teams made a react codebase that wound up being so scary and difficult to work in that essentially no one would touch it, until it eventually got rewritten. Two of those just rewrote it in react again, hoping that whatever faddish state library would save them from themselves. At the third, they rewrote it in svelte, which went much better. At least for me as someone who only writes FE code when I have to, svelte is much more comprehensible and sensible.