I've never been like "boy I really need a virtual DOM" so I guess I've never really seen the appeal of React. It just seems like a bundle of complexity, obfuscation and anti-patterns.
This is the tell. If you are able to satisfy your business requirements with "just JavaScript" then you are in a completely different world than the people building production-grade web apps and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. If you can be productive with "just JavaScript" then that's awesome!
However, I'm sure you understand there's a massive difference between simple pages that need *some* interactivity and a full-blown app inside a web browser.
I'm sure you've come across projects that probably didn't need the same tooling that I'm describing which ultimately boils down to a judgement call.
> I've never been like "boy I really need a virtual DOM" so I guess I've never really seen the appeal of React. It just seems like a bundle of complexity, obfuscation and anti-patterns.
That's because you've never needed it before. I've never been like "boy I really need a batteries-included web framework" so I guess I've never really seen the appeal of Rails. It just seems like a bundle of complexity, obfuscation and anti-patterns.
Please don't co-opt the word "production" to mean what you're implying here. Production doesn't mean single-page, reactive, etc. applications, it just means "in production."
Source: Running "just JS" in production for more than 6 years.
Is client-side rendering strictly necessary? Do your websites actually run offline?
I've built websites with React, used React Native -- none of it is necessary, nor the end-all-be-all. There's nothing truly novel going on. You can accomplish the exact same experience with server-side rendering and a tiny smattering of vanilla JS (you can use modern JS and polyfills and webpack/esbuild without React, you know).
For 99.9% of the web, I'd argue you don't need it. I have yet to encounter the 0.1% personally.
If you don't believe me, know that I'm not alone. Take a look at https://levels.io/deviance/ -- PHP and jQuery. What would React provide that isn't possible with his stack?
There is a disturbing amount of kool-aid being consumed around React/Vue/etc. Sure, you can slap together a website in record time with massive boilerplate/templates -- but so can I.
react-motion made animating card transitions very straight forward
During a game you can click on history items to look at previous game states, this is very straight forward with React's model
Sure you could get this all by rolling your own state dom renderer, but that's like saying you can do everything Lisp does in C. Greenspun's tenth rule rephrased as "Any sufficiently complicated JavaScript UI contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of React."
I have a feeling that you have already made up your mind not to like it, but if you ever give it a fair try, you might find it useful for some projects. It is very complex under the hood, of course, so if you want to have total control you might need to dig into the internals. But to a casual user it gives a very nice abstraction, very powerful, easy to use (granted - and abuse) and performant. The thing that sold it for me is the declarative programming. You have state, state translates to rendering... and that's pretty much it. Compared to thinking about transitions in native JS (or jQuery or whatever) it is like night and day in any non-trivial project.
I have quite a lot of history with native JS, but was happy to relinquish control to webpack/babel/react... not at first (had the same reaction as you do), but once I gave it a fair chance I discovered that things just work. Never had any problem with React not performing the way it should.
