React created roadblocks in our enterprise app

It does sound to my like all of these issues would be the same no matter what library/framework you chose. Working “against the grain”, choosing third party libraries, managing coding conventions and dealing with code bloat is common to all technologies. Unless all these points are adressed, you’re unlikely to achieve success with any platform.

AngularJS was indeed a bit of a pain when we switched to Angular 2+ and beyond, but it was so worth it.

I chose it because of the skillset that our current (small) team has. There's no way our 'designer' (more an HTML/CSS guy) could have wrapped his head around JSX, the way it mixes scripts with layout markup.

The way Angular separates concerns for us is great. And the components are extremely flexible and reactive and useful for iteration. And lazy-loaded routings? Yes please.

And with the Angular CLI and TypeScript typings and using VSCode it's an absolute joy to build sites with.

I'm not really a React fan, but you could have encountered all of these problems regardless of what you'd chosen to use. Sounds like the writer had good intentions and worked hard to do the right things, but that there were fundamental misalignments beyond the technology. Could they have planned ahead for those conflicts? Maybe. But, as noted in one of the paragraphs, enterprise type projects have a way of taking on a life of their own even when all parties have the best of intensions - and in many projects, not all parties actually have the best intensions. Heck, I've seen projects get started and deliberately set up to fail as a counterbalance to some other project. Live and learn.

There are a variety of clips of Jonathan blows twitch stream where he talks about web development. He feels that it has gotten so inefficient and complicated that it now takes 20x as long to create something as it needs to. He suggested that it would be faster for most teams to create their tech stacks utterly from scratch. He further argued that once this efficiency problem gets figured out, most web jobs will disappear. This is coming from a guy who is creating his own programming language for his next game though, and who makes his own game engines

Eg, here’s one example clip: https://youtu.be/yodWEPgn8NA

It's funny, react reminds me a lot of J2EE (and other enterprise frameworks) in many ways. A very large and complex framework, with lots of moving parts and additional stuff that needs to be glued in to make it all work.

There is a reaction against this happening right now. You can see it in hotwire from 37signals, Alpine.js and my own response to it: https://htmx.org

“Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability”