Why do some folks love assuming walking backwards to the past is the only reasonable path?
> The simple alternative is just around the corner: sprinkle vanilla JavaScript where it’s needed and don’t build your identity around a framework. That mindset is hard to swallow, though (especially when companies have spent millions convincing developers their stack is the only way forward).
Having grown up doing webdev at its emergence, those were not glorious years.
Even as a solo developer or part of a small team, it was hard as hell to have a perfect mental image of the app at all times, to understand all the combinatorial possibilities of what state your app is in now and what state you want to head to next.
Trying to forever update retained state is hard as hell, full of incredible opportunity for memory leaks, and created some super weird behaviors.
Even more so, "just write the basic code" doesn't scale. It's not a system that an org can follow. Folks will come and go, each going totally different directions. I don't know how to stress how immature and insane this sounds.
But folks love trashing that which is popular. To declare oneself the only sane mind amid a sea of madness.
I really do hope we see some post-React eras dawn, see more, that this isn't it, on and on. But I respect like hell the switch from a retained mode form of webdev to an immediate mode one. It doesn't just skip by so many really bad failure modes, it's often far far faster than the poor incomplete hacked out vanilla.js solution your org ended up with. I want us to change to move to not be stuck here. But to see where we are as unnecessary complexity, to invent fantastic degrading tales about the weak souls of men for getting us here: this is truly the behavior imo of lowlifes, of those spreading propoganda to spread the thinnest false confidence of hatred and disdain against the world.
Things are complex and that's ok. We are learning. The way out in onwards not idolizing a concocted naive pastoralized past.
You're right that immediate mode is great and makes life so much easier but for most use cases, React is very much a "retained mode" framework. If all of the valuable state in your app has its source of truth on the server (majority of apps), then retaining any of it in React state soup is unnecessary complexity.
People like to bring up how terrible it was to do vanilla.js in the old days but completely ignore that we are not, in fact, still in the old days. Native browser APIs are so much more powerful now and a ton of the pain that React was made to solve is even now handled declaratively with some simple HTML and CSS. No hacked out JS required.
Yes the 90s and 00s were rough for js, especially because of where JS and browsers were at, and also our collective knowledge.
However also it was much nicer in many ways -- we weren't trying to make insane single-page-apps like today.
The irony is that we have all of these powerful frameworks, but somehow they seem to mostly make worse/slower websites than this silly 0-javascript orange site we're on right now.
This comment is on point, so all I'll add is this:
> The way out is onwards not idolizing a concocted naive pastoralized past.
Ah, the noble JavaScript savage of 1999 - so in tune with his environment, his nose twitching in perplexed confusion as the unfamiliar scent of DHTML wafts past.
Unconcerned with a future that he cannot possibly imagine, he launches Dreamweaver and begins coding, secure in the knowledge that the more things change, the more they stay the same.