[mikeocool]

Looking at next I have to think that something went horribly wrong with front end development. It adds so much complexity for things that provide such minimal value to most apps.

React added a lot of complexity to the front end, but, for an app with a lot of front end state, brought a ton of value.

Next brings us file based routing, which seems cool, until you get into any sort of mildly complex use case, and — if your careful and don’t fuck it up, server side rendering, which I guess is cool, if you’re building an e-commerce product and is maybe cool for maybe a few other verticals?

[dimgl]

> React added a lot of complexity to the front end,

I keep hearing this but I disagree completely. Does no one remember Angular.js? Backbone? Ember.js? Even my favorite framework, Knockout, had lots of complexity.

SSR has been misused widely for years and we’re now starting to see the effects of that. But there ARE great use cases for SSR.

And frontend dev is the easiest it’s ever been. Run Vite Create and you have a fully working React SPA that can deployed in minutes on Render.com. No more messing with Webpack, or Bower, or Brocolli, or Gulp or Grunt or whatever madness came before. Frontend dev is in the best place it’s been in years.

[tasn]

> I keep hearing this but I disagree completely. Does no one remember Angular.js? Backbone? Ember.js? Even my favorite framework, Knockout, had lots of complexity.

You're using a different frame of reference. Those people you're referring to, including gp, probably mean that frameworks add complexity to the frontend. That would include all the ones you listed.

[tyre]

Okay, so go before that the jQuery (should win the Nobel Peace Prize) used with vanilla JS building absolutely bonkers custom scripts all over the place.

React was a paradigm shift towards more complex frontend apps, but there was still complexity. It replaced a bunch of .erb or mustache or whatever templating that then tried to be interactive with JS layered on.

What React replaced was not less complex overall, though technically I guess it moved more of the functionality to the frontend.

[codegeek]

I don't think people like GP are arguing that there is no place for these frameworks. the argument is that there are too many people just using these frameworks in projects where it may not be needed and blindly running "npm create react-app" or whatever. Then you add something like NextJS on top which makes things even worse.

I would argue that majority of NextJS projects are not needed to be built in NextJS but could do with simpler front end JS.

[jonny_eh]

I'll never go back to a pre-React rendering library. Newer ones, sure. jQuery was awesome in its day, but it made beautiful spaghetti.

[whoknowsidont]

Nope. Commenters here love to just state "X is over complicated!!!" when React is about the least complicated UI system across any medium there is.

[BoorishBears]

Next has made React pretty complicated with RSC.

And Next itself is abandoning all reason, like implementing redirects that break if you catch exceptions (because they're exceptions) and server actions that silently fail if a network issue occurs.

[braebo]

You clearly haven’t used Svelte. React is the most convoluted pile of bad abstractions of all of the big frameworks.

[whoknowsidont]

I most definitely have. Thanks for your worthless interjection though.

[arnaudsm]

Most bad tech decisions of Next.js are motivated by their business model, notably the middleware system to promote edge functions.

If you're looking for something simpler that's closer to Next's original premice, Remix.js is awesome and much lighter.

[dimal]

Hmm. I haven’t used Remix but I’ve avoided it for exactly the same reason, that I might become a victim of their latest business model.

They got their start way back with React-Router. At the time, their business was React Training. They’d train people how to use React. React Router had this curious tendency to change its API drastically with each release. Stuff you depended on would suddenly go away, and you’d be told “That’s not the right way to build apps anymore. This is the True Way.” It really sucked, but it seemed like a good way to drive demand for training.

Then they came up with Remix. Remix has been pretty stable, but when looking at React Router, I kept noticing there was stuff that felt more like an app framework than a router. It felt like it’s pulling me into Remix. Then last year they announced that they’re merging Remix and React Router. So if I was already dependent on React Router, I’d be fully committed to Remix, whether I wanted to be or not.

What new shiny thing or new business model will they be chasing next year? I’m not willing to risk finding out.

[mary-ext]

I've decided that if I ever had a need to write React apps I would stick to react-router 6.0.0 specifically.

I think they did good with v6 despite drastically changing it, but the v7+ smells like trouble.