React vs. Backbone in 2025

https://data-star.dev/guide/reactive_signals

The "paleo influencer" comparison is interesting, but I think it actually works both ways here.

Yes, there's a temptation to romanticize the past and dismiss modern tools. But there's an equally strong tendency to assume that newer, more popular, and more widely-adopted automatically means better. React didn't just win on pure technical merit. It has Facebook's marketing muscle behind it, it became a hiring checkbox, and it created a self-reinforcing ecosystem where everyone learns it because everyone uses it.

The article isn't suggesting that a "huge global collective of the world's most talented engineers have been conned." It's asking a much more nuanced question: did all that effort actually move us forward, or did we just move sideways into different complexity?

Look at the two implementations in the article. They do the same thing. They're roughly the same length. After 15 years of React development, countless developer hours, and a massive ecosystem, we're not writing dramatically less code or solving the problem more elegantly. We're just solving it differently, with different tradeoffs.

Sometimes looking backward isn't about being a "retro-idealist," it's about questioning whether we added complexity without proportional benefit. The paleo diet people might be onto something when they point out that we over-engineered our food. Maybe we over-engineered our frameworks too.

I agree that all frameworks require learning framework-specific concepts, but I think there's a meaningful difference in what you need to know and how that knowledge transfers.

With Backbone, jQuery, or vanilla JavaScript, you're learning DOM APIs, event patterns, and explicit state management. These are things that are visible, inspectable, and fundamentally close to the platform. When something breaks, you can pop open devtools, see the actual DOM, trace the event handlers, and understand what's happening. The knowledge you gain is transferable. It's about how the web platform actually works.

With React, you're learning abstractions on top of abstractions: virtual DOM diffing, reconciliation algorithms, why objects in dependency arrays cause infinite loops, why your click handler sees stale state, why your input mysteriously cleared itself. This is React-specific magic that doesn't transfer. It's knowledge about how to work around React's mental model, not knowledge about how the web works.

You mention that batching and DOM reconciliation are solvable problems that justify React's complexity. But the article's point is that for most apps -- not Facebook-scale apps with 1,000 components on one page, but normal CRUD apps -- those problems can be solved with simpler patterns and conventions. We don't need a virtual DOM and a sophisticated reconciliation algorithm to build a form validator.

The real question isn't "does React solve problems?" It's "does React's complexity match the complexity of the problems most developers are actually solving?"