A couple people have asked what complexities I’m referring to and mainly what I mean is just how much bloat goes into making anything, and at a higher level the general course of action seems to be to just keep adding to the system until you get what you want out of it instead of trying to fix or improve underlying problems with the web.
I know we can’t just pause the internet while everyone comes to a consensus on how we want to make it more interactive and fix underlying problems, but at least to me it seems like all the effort that could be spent working towards that is instead being spent figuring out ways to just avoid as much of the underlying pieces as possible by jamming your own implementation on top of it.
I agree that getting setup and using things like React or Node for a backend is easy, but the number of dependencies, size of the app, tooling needed, memory used are all going to grow exponentially as soon as you start trying to do something non trivial, and the solution to fix these problems is yet again to add more complexity, where you will need to learn a lot more about how all of those nice tools that just worked for you out of the box are actually working
This isn’t a React or a frontend specific example entirely, but I’ve seen many people jump into creating a simple app and right off the bat implementing a federated GraphQL design because of all the great things they heard about GraphQL from the community, which is fine but a very simple REST design would have worked just as well if not better and would be in my opinion much simpler to maintain and manage complex things like caching.