Oh yes you are right. My bad. I got my dependencies backwards. We were using react 17 and wanted to upgrade to 18, but first we had to migrate an entire app on MUI v4 to v5 first since v4 was not supported by 18. And it was an upgrade full of breaking changes.
My point still stands that having a UI library like MUI deeply ingrained into your app can cause dependency and other issues like this. The speed you get upfront can bite you if you don’t plan carefully. Sure there are steps we could have taken to avoid such a mess. But that’s not how things often work out.
Still not sure if the alternative of vendoring like Shadcn, where a migration like this requires a black box probability machine to do the migration for you is any better.
My understanding is they made an LLM skill for updating because it’s trendy and people are gonna point an agent at it anyway. I think the winning idea is you can update components in your design system piecemeal instead of needing to do a Migration.
My point still stands that having a UI library like MUI deeply ingrained into your app can cause dependency and other issues like this. The speed you get upfront can bite you if you don’t plan carefully. Sure there are steps we could have taken to avoid such a mess. But that’s not how things often work out.