Maybe years ago. Now it's a bloated beast.
I think this is the reason why React feels normal to you. But as someone coming into it fresh, React felt like there were always 4 different ways to do the same thing and 3 of them are wrong because they built a new API/there are more idiomatic ways to accomplish the same thing now. If you have a decade of experience, then you probably do most things the right/obvious way so don't even notice all the incorrect ways/footguns that React gives you.
Saying React is a "bloated monster" and then not being able to provide a single example of ways it has bloated is a joke. The article we're looking at shows that the bundle size can be a bit bigger but the speed to render is equivalent to all these other frameworks.
If you really love minimal bundle sizes, go off, but bundle size is not how I would define bloat in a framework
The article seems to make the bloat self-evident by comparing the load times of identical apps and finding React magnitudes slower.
To be fair, I haven't written in React for a few years now. I reached for Svelte with the last two apps I built after using React professionally for 4 years. I was expecting there to be a learning curve and there just... wasn't? It was staggering how little I had to think about. Even something as small as not having to write in JSX (however normalized I was to writing in it) really felt meaningful once I took a step back and saw the forest for the trees.
I dunno. I just remember being on the interview circuit and asking engineers to tell me about useCallback, useEffect, useMemo, and memo and how they're used, how something like console.log would fair in relation to them, when to include/exclude arguments from memoization arrays, etc.. and it was pretty easy to trip a lot of people up. I think the introduction of the compiler is an attempt to mitigate a lot of those pains, but newer frameworks designed with those headaches in mind from the start rather than mitigating much later and you can feel it.
React 19 required almost no code changes in my multiple production apps so unless I missed something, I would say the API surface was virtually unchanged by it
> The article seems to make the bloat self-evident by comparing the load times of identical apps and finding React magnitudes slower.
What are you talking about? Next.js != React, that's your own fault if you bought into their marketing. TanStack / React looks to be a slightly larger bundle size but I'm seeing FCP differences from 35ms to 43ms (React being 43ms), how is that orders of magnitude slower?
Bad faith or bad reading, I can't help you either way here
> asking engineers to tell me about useCallback, useEffect, useMemo, and memo and how they're used
What are you even trying to say? Are you implying that other web frameworks don't come with any state management, or that they are reactive, or that you don't need the concepts from React in them?
"People got confused sometimes" isn't really a defense when the alternative is a framework you only ever use on solo greenfield projects that you've never talked to another engineer about their core concepts.
Seriously, you are just peddling groupthink, there isn't a single legit criticism of React.
Next.js, on the flip side, we should all go off on those clowns, but I wouldn't touch that with a 10 foot pole so I don't see how it's even relevant.
"use no memo"
react now needs you to declare what you are not using, using a language "feature" that does not exist. It is crazy how people keep denying reality wrt React.
Are directives horrible? Absolutely. Did I encounter any need for this across porting 4 different apps and a component library to React 19? No, it was frictionless.
Because React is the same as it has been for a long time.
Maybe hooks are cool but the same code written in react vs vue vs svelte or something else is always easier on the eyes and more readable. Dependency arrays and stale closures are super annoying.
Sorry but I really hate React. I've dealt with way too many shit codebases. Meanwhile working in vue/svelte is a garden of roses even if written by raw juniors.
Congrats, it's the most popular framework, no doubt there are abuses out there.
I highly doubt raw juniors are actually writing beautiful vue/svelte code, if obviously emotionally charged anecdotes are your only arguments here, I think you can just admit you see "Facebook" and crash out...
Now with Laravel, Blade and JQuery the IDE support is low but everything is easy enough and we work as a team and do merge requests and it's a chill job even if it's full stack.
