This complexity is out of hand. The worst is we now use yet more solutions (for example server-side rendering, which now needs its own Node server and it's yet another thing to deploy in addition to your main backend) just to try and dig ourselves out of the hole we dug in the first place. Imagine if we suddenly decided concrete isn't cool anymore and everyone should use duct tape. Given its obvious shortcomings we now waste time trying to make tape work, going as far as making concrete-reinforced duct tape and calling it the best new thing of the day... instead of just using the "uncool" concrete in the first place.
This guy has a point, for 90% of projects, you don't need React (those who tell you otherwise are trying to justify their career and position because from my experience most React/Vue front-end positions at companies are pointless and just add unneeded complexity).
War story time: a client was building a complex financial product (includes real-time automated trading, etc). The backend was finished but we couldn't test it because despit several months months the React front-end still wasn't ready and days were wasted on basic things like a signup form, displaying the 2FA QR code, user onboarding wizard, etc. Let that sink in for a minute: we could successfully decide when to make transactions worth millions of dollars automatically, but dug a hole so deep on the front-end that we couldn't do basic things that even the first iteration of HTML forms could do just fine 20 years ago. The powers that be didn't want to lose face so they still kept at using that trainwreck of a front-end instead of ripping the whole thing out and rebuilding it using HTML forms in a matter of hours. I didn't stick around to see if they ever finished the project.
