Tell HN: Unpopular opinion: All Meta's open source front end stuff sucks

I was just thinking the other day how everything Meta has put out on the frontend, I felt compelled to use it because of the hype. But I've ended up being frustrated by almost all of it.

It really feels like Meta has led us on a shitty frontend path for the past 5+ years that we need to leave behind.

- Flow

- Jest

- Metro

- React

- React Native

- GraphQL

- Flux/Redux

Everything they do is just so overly complicated, and so many layers of abstraction rolled up in a messy ball of mud.

Letting such a large company lead the frontend space is a bad idea, because if they make a bad architectural decision they have to just keep rolling with it because they roll it out so widely internally, and improvements are very slow because of the business impact.

Simplicity in my book comes down to how comprehensible is your stack trace. A few lines of code calling into a giant magical function is not simple.

Maybe your definition of simplicity does not satisfy all relevant needs.

React brings some complexity but at the benefit of better state management and DX. If you have ever worked on large projects where each button has a click handler to do 20 different things, you will find that it's easy to miss some edge cases and have state drift.

I mostly agree, and usually feel like a grouchy old man for it. Been doing FE for a long while, jQuery into stuff like Meteor, then early Angular and Ember... There were a lot of frustrations but I found that they were more easily overcome, and past a certain point I've felt like we aren't getting any more technologically superior with reimagined frameworks, but rather just finding a new flavour of the month.

Conversely, React Native (and other similar solutions, even Electron which I love to hate) are AMAZING and I feel like it's such a breath of fresh air compared to pure native app development. They have their ups and their downs, and they're not always the best solution for a given problem, but they've brought so much opportunity for dev efficiencies within companies and allowed solutions to be built that would've otherwise been cost-ineffective in the past.

It's a legitimately unpopular opinion only because React is on that list. Take React off this list and the opinion will be stale.

I also don't know what it means for FB to be "leading" in this space because they don't push any of their other solutions on you. In fact, React being a stand-alone library may be a long-term strategic mistake as it seems the ecosystem is tending towards mega-frameworks.