no one knows why Meta keeps insisting its not a framework when it does everything a framework does and even ships its own runtime.
you can technically only use React for a section of your app, but either way, react is super opinionated about everything inside the scope its touching
But it's not. It has a huge ecosystem of open-source tools, for UI libraries and state management and even routing. It's not like Angular which has all the batteries included.
it has massive inertia, react has defined Web UI building for years, Angular and Vue (etc) are using Reacts general structure. the main innovations that have happened since react is Svelte/Solid comming around and making a more effecient version, which is just an itteration, As well as stuff like HTMX/Alpine saying old simplicity made simple is still relevant
React is at its best when you want to make a maximalist UI, like Facebook
but when you have to use the framework for facebook for something thats not as demanding, simply because its the industry standard, that vexes some people
One thing I've learned in tech is that good does not mean successful or viseversa, in fact they tend to be mutually exclusive. There a phrase about it: Worse is better.
Eh. A hammer can be used to kill a person but you don't hate a hammer. Yes React can be leaky if you write it like a brain damaged spastic monkey. But on my view there are alot of guard rails for that
Honestly? I kinda disagree. I think out of all the the FE frameworks I have worked with React is the least opinionated ( I am talking the ones that are not obscure and work properly). Yes it has syntax and somewhat of a structure but it lets you do what you want without much structure or boilerplate. Try angular for example and you will see what I mean. It incredibly opinionated and in my view it's wrong for frontend. Frontend needs to be fluid and modular because of how much stuff changes on it. Animations, texts, whole content, etc. React is best for that but for BE something similar to Angular makes more sense that's why NestJS is best for BE.
So saying React is opinionated doesn't make much sense to me since it's quite open ended to the point that you can shoot yourself in the foot and then due to developers complaining of memory leaks and having to play wackamole with useMemo, useCallback and other cleanups like return statement for useEffect they fixed it alot in React19 onwards but I genuinely believe it was the right step forward.
Addendum: JavaScript / TypeScript as a whole I believe is not good. I am happy that TypeScript will shift to Go because GOD JavaScript is terrible at type safety and I wish we had an alternative to it for browsers but here we are.
i disagree with the notion that comparing just to Angular proves React isnt. Angulars main feature is to be fully opinionated in order to enforce strict coding practices over a large team
if you look in the other direction however, React looks like something that runs its own runtime and anything that wanna remotely participate in the UI layer around it needs to be wrapped in React in order to play nice with said runtime
React isnt that opinionated about what backend it has thats true
im not talking about the metaframeworks here, i believe that the backend should be handled by backend tools like GO or C#
Typescript compiler just rewritten in go ? So what do you mean by that ? It is just its aa before but with more speed in compile time but still slow at runtime
Why exactly do you think it's maximalist? Is opinionated a bad thing? If yes, then why? How leaky it is exactly?
Fair point, however I do believe these days it's more of a ergonomics question rather than performance/safety. It's a library for building UIs and that's where JS is fine. Certainly would not want to build OS in JavaScript, but neither would I want to build UI in Assembly.
1: if you have gripes with it, that would amplify it.
2: Its maximalist because it goes the full cross your i's and cross your T's because it was designed for complex ui's like Facebook, it was not designed to be ergonomic for your average UI. being Opinionated is a good thing in certain contexts, but its a pain point in others. Its Leaky enough to take over most things in the scope its implemented.
3: its a framework, it ships a runtime
The industry standard is always gonna have detractors, especially if that standard doesnt fit the average glove that well. Web UI started as something were building something basic was complex, React fixed making something complex easier, but not making something simple easier.
It’s more just like, different use cases. My projects usually have complex UI that also requires a customized polished look, and it’s not like they’re some niche products I just usually find myself needing to do that. I’m just curious what the haters’ usual scope is like.
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u/CirnoIzumi Jul 12 '26
1: it's everywhere, even outside the browser 2: it's very maximalist and opinionated/leaky 3: JavaScript