Things I wish I knew before moving 50K lines of code to React Server Components

But seriously I have no idea of a single remotely well-known application that satisfies the above. If the modern web is so bad where are the products that prove that it can be done better more simply? There’s billions to be made if that’s true in all industries, is nobody skilled capable of capitalizing on this gold mine of opportunity wherein the entire industry is self sabotaging?

I’m left to conclude that these HN commenters with their hot takes about how the modern web sucks just generally either don’t understand what makes products successful or never have truly experienced the issues these frameworks solve for.

Quoting[0]:

"The entropy of a system can in fact be shown to be a measure of its disorder and of the unavailability of energy to do work."

I rather like that - where "work" is the time spent solving first order business problems, and "disorder" is a measure of the energy spent not directly solving the business problem. AKA dealing with accidental complexity.

[0] https://www.coursehero.com/study-guides/physics/15-6-entropy...

IMO web dev has never seen better tooling than today, and user experience has improved tremendously over the years.

What we used to call AJAX has grown from a neat side toy to a basic part of everyday life in the form of client components and SPAs. The server is still as powerful as ever if you want it to be. But having such awesome client-side power is nice for interactive apps like dashboards, maps, games, forums, office apps, online IDEs, etc. It enabled the wholesale migration of everyday apps from bespoke desktop apps for each OS to a universal platform across all laptops and desktops.

All that power of course required more complexity. It's very different trying to write a blog or landing page in HTML/CSS vs trying to write a whole web app. Angular and React were invented to help develop apps that were several times more complex than their precesssors, at a time when JS runtimes (and the language itself) were still really primitive compared to the server side languages of the time.

Yeah, there was a really painful period there in the late 2010s where different JS frameworks each solved a tiny part of the problem. These days it's less of an issue. Next won, became the default, and deservedly so. It's really good, and has an appropriate level of abstraction for mid complexity apps, and allows a good mix of server-side rendering and client-side pages. Adding React Server Components makes that division a cleaner first class citizen.

That only makes sense at a certain complexity though. If you don't need it, don't use it. If you're making a largely static blog or documentation site, there are simpler architectures. You can still use HTML and sprinkle in a few lines of JS as needed. You can still use WordPress or Wix for most small business needs.

But if you're building more complex apps, god, React is an absolute dream compared to trying to round-trip every minor interaction to the server for recomputing the UI and sending over an entire HTML page every time, losing context and page position and half filled forms and whatever. It also encouraged the use of form data as state, and work was often lost on an accidental back button or the frequent server crashes before the advent of trivial cloud scaling.

IMO it's only overengineered when misapplied. Some of these tools are really useful, even essential, in the proper use cases. Maybe the sad part is that we overteach them and encourage their use even when they're not necessary (or perhaps counterproductive). Right tool for the job and all that.

Edit: not really pitching React over Vue or Svelte or HTMX or whatever, just that client-side complexity has its uses. Pros and cons, not strictly better or worse.