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React is mostly HTML driven by data. "HTML killed front end innovation". Well that enabled standards to build real use cases on it with a common ground.
Before React, the Web world was a mess. In 2025, you have lots of frameworks to explore. React did not kill front end innovation at all, it just became a standard that gives more common understanding to building a website.
It's a minimal, compilation-free JavaScript library that adds reactivity to native web components, as well as scoped styles and a few other ease-of-life features.
Mobile development forums were having all-out wars regarding MVP vs MVVM vs VIPER vs ... vs ... yadda yadda.
Now I can just enjoy stable predictable tooling and I can benefit from tons of examples and documentation.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Plus, I have no interest in front end innovation. I think HN and Craigslist are as good aw it gets.
The day we stop "innovating" in front end by inventing new UI's every month, global productivity is going to skyrocket.
I think this article discounts the reasons behind frontend decisions... priorities are absolutely fast execution time and ease of hiring. There is very, very little reason to care about optimizing frontend performance for a vast majority of apps. Users just don't care. It doesn't make the company more money. If a framework is easy to use and everyone knows it, it's simply the best choice for 90%+ of teams.
This means that in theory the backend/runtime can be replaced (and was replaced ones from React to Preact (0.7.0 -> 0.8.0) then to use hooks and signals instead of class components (0.19.0 -> 0.20.0), and the code will remain the same.
This has one drawback which deters framework creators from choosing the language since there is no reason to innovate on something that is already "done", which leads to fewer people using it in general and hinders adoption, but I'm still optimistic.
It may be the default today, but it largely earned that position by being one of the better options out there. Today there's alternatives and even Angular still has a decent following, not that I'll touch it if I can avoid it.
edit: Just adding to the pain at the time... iirc Webpack + Babel + Sass + CSS + ReactTransforms each with wierd bespoke configuration options... Babel itself was a massive pain for even trying to limit to modern-ish targets or multi-target.
React itself was a bit awkward as well, a lot of the concepts themselves were difficult, and IMO, it didn't get much easier until functional components, even if that really complicated the library itself.
I still have mixed to poor feelings on Server Components as I think it's largely a waste for the types of things people typically build. HTMLX (speaking of innovation) is likely a better option in that space.
That said, I do like MUI (formerly Material-UI, a Material Design Implementation), I think the component architecture is really thoughtful and works well, biggest issue is that devs don't take the couple hours to read the docs and even have awareness of what's in that box.
I also like Redux and even hand-written reducers and extensions quite a bit.