[jakubmazanec]

I share your feelings. If you like React and its trade-offs, and you're comfortable using it (based on various HN discussion the easiest sign is that you're able to understand the concept of hooks and you don't have the need to wrongly yell everywhere how it's a bad abstraction :D), you can forget about Datastar or HTMAX.

[spoiler]

For context, I worked with large React codebases, contributed to various ecosystem libraries (a few bigger ones: react-redux, styled components, react-router). So, I'm pretty comfortable with hooks, but I still make mistakes with them if React isn't in my daily routine (different day job now, only use React occasionally for some pet projects).

I've also onboard interns and juniors onto React codebase, and there's things about React that only really make sense if you're more old-school and know how different types behave to understand why certain things are necessary.

I remember explaining to an intern why passing an inlined object as a prop was causing the component to rerender, and they asked whether that's a codebase smell... That question kinda shocked me because to me it was obvious why this happens, but it's not even a React issue directly. Howeve the fix is to write "un-javascripty" code in React. So this persons intro to JS is React and their whole understanding of JS is weirdly anchored around React now.

So I totally understand the critique of hooks. They just don't seem to be in the spirit of the language, but do work really well in spite of the language.

As someone who survived the early JS wilderness, then found refuge in jQuery, and after trying a bunch of frameworks and libraries, finally settled on React: I think React is great, but objectively parts of it suck, and it's not entirl its fault

[Izkata]

> and they asked whether that's a codebase smell...

Something that's been an issue with our most junior dev, he's heard a lot of terminology but never really learned what some of those terms mean, so he'll use them in ways that don't really make sense. Your example here is just the kind of thing I'd expect from him, if he's heard the phrase "code smell" but assumed something incorrect about what it meant and never actually looked up what it means.

It is possible your co-worker was asking you this the other way around - that they'd just learned the term and were trying to understand it rather than apply it.