React is winning by default and slowing innovation • Hacker News Board

Re: React is winning by default and slowing innovation

#121

Post by hn_acc1 » Mon, Sep 15, 2025, 9:35 PM UTC

legitster wrote: post #56

I'm an old-school web guy. React is stupid easy, but by nature of things being easy it also encourages really bad habits. Performance is one thing (the internet is getting slower! Impressively bad!), but also webapps are becoming so incredibly overdesigned, at the expense of the user experience. Before we had the discrete fields of front-end engineering, design, UX, etc web design was inherently limited and we used s…

Yeah, the "buttons that move as the page loads" is the single biggest thing I hate about the modern web. I go to click one, and in that instant, it's moved and replaced by a different one that I didn't want to click.

Then again, I'm hardly one to talk. The last time I wrote actual web code was JSPs in 2001. I did hack on some JS code to add dynamic table sorting to some html report pages I created later, but that's about it.. Never liked JS's idea of "we can be every programming language at once with the standards from none of them".. Sure, it's flexible, but so is a noodle..

Re: React is winning by default and slowing innovation

#122

Post by jgalt212 » Mon, Sep 15, 2025, 9:35 PM UTC

zsimjee wrote: post #115

The network effect gets compounded by LLMs/vibecoding. I'm not just talking about v0 or replit either. Fire a prompt at ChatGPT to build a web app and most of the time it will give you react components in return.

Makes sense to me. I've read that LLMs are more competent in React than other frameworks.

Re: React is winning by default and slowing innovation

#123

Post by CBLT » Mon, Sep 15, 2025, 9:37 PM UTC

sapiogram wrote: post #118

827a wrote: post #102

React is winning because its really good. Even if the cost is an extra few milliseconds of render time and few extra hours of dev time figuring out things like hook dependencies. If React starts taking a backseat, it'll be because its no longer really good. And, to be fair: I've started to see this happen. Next & Vercel have totally taken over the React world, and they've proven to make quite poor architectural decis…

What is Vercel doing to React? I just know them as a simple hosting solution.

Vercel is anything but simple. Easy? Sure.

Re: React is winning by default and slowing innovation

#124

Post by postalrat » Mon, Sep 15, 2025, 9:37 PM UTC

sapiogram wrote: post #118

827a wrote: post #102

React is winning because its really good. Even if the cost is an extra few milliseconds of render time and few extra hours of dev time figuring out things like hook dependencies. If React starts taking a backseat, it'll be because its no longer really good. And, to be fair: I've started to see this happen. Next & Vercel have totally taken over the React world, and they've proven to make quite poor architectural decis…

What is Vercel doing to React? I just know them as a simple hosting solution.

They developed next.js

Re: React is winning by default and slowing innovation

#125

Post by latchkey » Mon, Sep 15, 2025, 9:38 PM UTC

sapiogram wrote: post #118

827a wrote: post #102

React is winning because its really good. Even if the cost is an extra few milliseconds of render time and few extra hours of dev time figuring out things like hook dependencies. If React starts taking a backseat, it'll be because its no longer really good. And, to be fair: I've started to see this happen. Next & Vercel have totally taken over the React world, and they've proven to make quite poor architectural decis…

What is Vercel doing to React? I just know them as a simple hosting solution.

At least in my own experience, I tried building a relatively simple static SPA NextJS React app with their router, and wanted to host it on CloudFlare Pages.

It ran locally in dev mode just fine. Once I deployed it on CFP, the router broke. No errors in the console, it just didn't work.

If I'm forced to use Vercel to make a simple SPA work, which then forced me into paying for their service, that's the problem.

Re: React is winning by default and slowing innovation

#126

Post by daxfohl » Mon, Sep 15, 2025, 9:40 PM UTC

In the AI age we'll probably see even more of a migration toward whatever frameworks have the most training data and are easiest for code-completion agents to work with. Putting much effort into alternative frameworks now seems like even more of a losing battle than previously.

In a way, that might be better though. If you need a framework that's optimized for lightning speed, then maybe you want to be hand-coding it anyway. Also, with fewer people using it, there's perhaps less chance of it becoming bloated over time. The framework no longer has to compete with React; it has its own reason for existence and can focus on the things that make it special, not the things that make it more like React.

Re: React is winning by default and slowing innovation

#127

Post by squidsoup » Mon, Sep 15, 2025, 9:40 PM UTC

SebastianKra wrote: post #59

Why do these articles keep dismissing the innovations by React itself. The Svelte compiler is revolutionary, but the React compiler is not enough somehow. The React-Team has worked on server components, concurrent rendering, suspense & transitions. They all integrate with each other to allow for some really elegant patterns. While the VDOM overhead does exist, it's not the performance bottleneck. More likely reasons…

You don't even need RSC to fix waterfall fetching, relay solves this problem beautifully.

Re: React is winning by default and slowing innovation

#128

Post by Marazan » Mon, Sep 15, 2025, 9:41 PM UTC

jmcgough wrote: post #6

> React didn’t win purely on technical merit A sentence written by someone who clearly hasn't worked on a large Angular 1.x project.

I cannot upvote this comment enough.

I am so glad to be old and have lived through the transition from Angular to React. To understand why we have React. In fact I am so old I have lived through the transition from Adobe Flex to Javascript Frameworks first.

And the thing that is clear to me is that wave of Javascript Frameworks, of which Angular was one, looked at Flex and leanred all the wrong lessons (I'm looking at you two-way data binding) whilst React got second mover advantage and learnt all the right lessons.

Re: React is winning by default and slowing innovation

#129

Post by Glyptodon » Mon, Sep 15, 2025, 9:42 PM UTC

For early stage startups using react easily multiplies your required engineering man hours to get to market by a considerable factor. The biggest pro is probably that it pairs nicely with GraphQL, which, in many domains, is nicer to work with on the back-end compared to other options, but is also decidedly unfriendly to most options that minimize front end dev hours.

Point being, not to say no to React, but that if your org's size is small enough that you don't truly have multiple teams, you probably get way more mileage and output per $ using tooling that takes after Phoenix Live View, whatever that is - Hotwire, Livewire, etc.

On the other hand, you may expect that having more distinct BE/FE will pay off because of being able to have separate teams, easier to fit in a mobile app, etc. This has some truth, but it can easily turn into taking away from product focus too early in a company's lifecycle.

Re: React is winning by default and slowing innovation

#130

Post by thomaslord » Mon, Sep 15, 2025, 9:42 PM UTC

apsurd wrote: post #112

827a wrote: post #102

React is winning because its really good. Even if the cost is an extra few milliseconds of render time and few extra hours of dev time figuring out things like hook dependencies. If React starts taking a backseat, it'll be because its no longer really good. And, to be fair: I've started to see this happen. Next & Vercel have totally taken over the React world, and they've proven to make quite poor architectural decis…

+1 React DX is really great. It started really great and it got weird and bloated but it's still really great relative to the JS landscape hell. But, also yes, it's a pain in the ass and a frustrating kind of necessary evil. So there is room for improvements. Nextjs is a living hell. The ironic thing is AI makes it dramatically more tolerable to the point it's actually pretty good. But that can't be a good thing in t…

Honestly I think React DX kinda sucks, at least in some areas. Performance is one of the worst (`useMemo` and `componentShouldUpdate` are way to easy to ignore, constant re-renders are the norm and writing performant React code requires conscious effort to avoid footguns) but it's also just less self-explanatory than the alternatives I've tried.

I started doing web dev before reactivity frameworks were a thing, and I found Vue to be the most intuitive of the frameworks available when I first needed reactivity. To me, Vue feels like HTML with superpowers while React feels like a whole new way of thinking about webapps. I'm honestly a bit surprised that the article doesn't mention Vue, since Vue is (and has been for a while) the most popular "not React or Angular" framework option. Newer versions of Vue even support the "disappearing framework" feature Svelte was built for, which I'm excited to take advantage of when my biggest work project finally moves to Vue 3.