This isn't "We replaced a React app with an HTML form and performance improved." It's "We replaced a bad web page with a good web page and performance improved."
Attributing this to the technology driving the browser experience is silly. You can make a brilliant user experience with React. You can make a terrible website with plain HTML.
The improvement comes from the change design, not tech.
> The improvement comes from the change design, not tech.
You could argue that the constraints of using HTML-first (as they call it) helped them stay away from the bad patterns they were using before.
But you’re right: The user change came from fixing the design, not the technology used.
This is a lot like those bad resume bullet points where someone tries to claim an increase in business was due to their code change. “Increased visitor count 100% by rewriting website to be HTML-first”. Then when you ask them about that point they concede that the entire site was redesigned to fix some design problems or add a feature and that’s what drove the visitor increase.
Of course, is just what with React is 100x harder, and when you fail the fans will blame you instead of the technology.
The standard answer to that is that some technologies make one harder than the other. That's kind of true from first principles, but it requires making the case that e.g. React is actually harder to make good than a plain HTML page.
Fun thing, TFA describes a kind of multi-page wizard style form that I haven't seen a lot anymore in the last decade or so. But when I did see it, it's always some dogshit enterprise system. Some Oracle product for expensing expenses last time.
The problem with those things always seems to be that they are slow in the middle of doing your task. Every button is seconds of waiting. Doubly annoying if you have to go back a step or two. The badly coded SPAs seem to be slow at the start. It takes a while to load, but once it's loaded its performance is usually okay.
I don’t like multi-page forms when I’m not able to see at a glance all the info needed to fill out the form. Though I guess if my progress is durably saved that makes it not so bad. The worst is when I fill out a bunch of stuff and then realize it’s asking for info I don’t have, and after I get the info I have to fill everything out again from scratch!
Is it slow though? Like in practice? This demo [1] using Datastar (a streaming HTML framework) every action including scrolling roundtrips to the server. Even the checkboxes changing colour is a roundtrip.
https://checkboxes.andersmurphy.com
The advantage of SPAs, like the checkboxes page, is that they can do the round-trip less visibly. The user can still continue the next thing. So even if it is slow, it's less of a deal than loading and rendering a page anew.
> Is it slow though? Like in practice?
The multi-page wizards? The ones I've seen were. Enterprise crap systems.