[callumprentice]

Excellent article but I am always torn when I read inspirational articles like this - it makes perfect sense to me and I love the idea of simple, non-nonsense sites that work well, load quickly and don't rely on the latest browsers to function.

Then I start to wonder if that's just because I'm not smart enough to understand React or whatever the fancy technology of the day is.

Feels like I have a hard understanding threshold that cannot be breached - give me a simple editor like Sublime and ask me to make a web page - even with JavaScript - and it's my happy place. Give me VSCode or Zed, Claude/Copilot/ChatGPT plugins everywhere, React tutorials and my brain goes to mush.

[thesuitonym]

If it makes you feel any better, the people using the fancy frameworks and whatnot usually aren't smart enough to understand them either.

[zem]

you might enjoy this post on complexity and why it is bad: https://tengstrand.github.io/blog/2019-09-14-the-origin-of-c...

keeping things simple is not a bad thing, and often requires you to be smart enough not to overcomplicate them.

[LNSY]

I love the web. I hate what the React cretins have done to it.

Embrace Extend Extinguish is real, and the people going along with it deserve to be replaced by a LLM that lies and spits out garbage code just like they do but faster.

[elxr]

React has helped folks like vercel/convex/cloudflare to build fantastic dashboards. There's just as many examples of well done React as there are the opposite.

I generally prefer solidJS nowadays, but the react ecosystem has enabled lots of amazing user experiences (and developer experiences too if you don't fall into the trap of overcomplexity).