[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.