Literally anything built with NPM: megabytes? tens of megabytes? in size, totally inscrutable, code being pulled in from hundreds of megabytes of code in tens of thousands of packages from hundreds or thousands of people of unknown (and unknowable) competence and trustworthiness, if it breaks not only do you not know who to blame but you probably have literally no idea what wrong.
Yeah, jQuery was probably better.
So initially an equivalent React and jQuery app would have React look a lot faster, due to smart / batched DOM updates. However, because React is so fast it made people create apps differently.
As always in software development, an application will grow to fill up available performance / memory. If people were to develop on intentionally constricted computers they would do things differently.
(IIRC, at Facebook they'll throttle the internet on some days to 3g speeds to force this exact thing. Tangentially related, at Netflix (iirc) they have Chaos Monkey which randomly shuts down servers and causes problems, so errors are a day to day thing instead of an exception they've not foreseen).
React is just so, so much nicer to work with. It's easy to be dismissive if you've never had to develop UIs with jQuery and didn't experience yourself the transition to React which is a million times better in terms of developer experience.
I feel like people that don't build UIs themselves think of them too much in a completely functional way as in "it's just buttons and form inputs that do X", and forget about the massive complexity, edge cases, aesthetic requirements, accessibility, rendering on different viewports, huge statefulness, and so on.
And then if you're still feeling cocky try finding someone else who uses one without the other.
Reading Computer Lib/Dream Machine over the holidays and I wonder where it all went so wrong.
On both ends.
Software developers hate boring software for pragmatic HR-driven career reasons and because devs are apes and apes are faddish and like the shiny new thing.
And commercial hegemony tends to go to the companies that slap something together with duct tape and bubble gum and rush it out the door.
So you get clusterfucks like Unix winning out against elegantly designed Lisp systems, and clusterfucks like Linux winning out against elegantly designed Unix systems, and clusterfucks like Docker and microservices and whatever other "innovations" "winning out" over elegantly design Linux package management and normal webservers and whatnot.
At some point someone important will figure out that no software should ever need to be updated for any reason ever, and a software update should carry the same stigma as...I don't know...adultery once carried. Or an oil spill. Or cooking the books. Whatever.
But then also it's important to be realistic. If anyone ever goes back and fixes any of this, well, a whole lot of very smart people are going to go unemployed.
Speaking of which...
Recursive solutions are more elegant but you still use a stack and while loop to not smash the stack.
