> Very few components in a React application require state management.
I agree. My apps usually consist of a few stateful components for dropdowns and modals and such with the remaining being functional components. The problem is the majority of "legacy" react apps I've come across seem to have the opposite ratio (I personally think this is because most react tutorials are written for fresh out of bootcamp developers by slightly more experienced fresh out of bootcamp developers).
> You are doing a lot of deep compares on state in a real world application?
Not a lot, but when you need it you really need it (usually for shouldComponentUpdate, but most recently I needed it for synchronizing state to localStorage).
> I've seen a situation with 24(yup, 24) reducer functions for a single action type.
You're right, that is insane. I personally use thunks or sagas to dispatch multiple actions that are specific to the domain model being updated and never update multiple slices of the state tree with a single action. For example, the action dispatched by clicking the sign in button should not update the user profile and the navigation state. Again, the problem in your example is not redux, it's a lack of separation of concerns.
> Become a components view is not coupled to the global state of your application.
The state of your application has to go somewhere, and if you are creating a small amount of stateful components and a lot of functional components, you are doing a lot of prop drilling, and every time the stateful component is updated the entire component tree gets re-rendered. If you keep the stateful components at the minimum height necessary, your business logic will be split up according to where it needs to be used instead of logically grouped by feature.
> summary, what you are describing is the "theory" of why Redux and associated tools should work.
You are arguing that redux is a poor choice because bad developers write bad code. I'm saying that the constraints that redux imposes on the structure of your code makes it easier to enforce separation of concerns as the app scales in complexity. The things about redux that most people complain about are the things that make it work so well in complex applications. I have seen unmaintainable apps that used redux, and equally unmaintainable apps that used component state. I don't think anyone can accurately say that one is worse than the other in a pathological case. At this point we're just arguing about opinions, but I maintain that explicit structure using shared conventions is still better than ad-hoc structure that requires institutional knowledge to navigate, even in the hands of untrained code monkeys.
One thing I have noticed is that every time react or redux comes up on HN it starts a flame war with the same arguments rehashed over and over, and when I get involved in these discussions none of my comments ever get any up or downvotes, which tells me that nobody is reading this and we should get back to work. :)
