Does anybody like React?

JSX.lol - Does anybody actually like React?

The End In my experience, React (et al) is almost always the wrong solution. React has its place, I’m sure, but it has turned into the proverbial hammer that makes everything look like a nail. I also know that React can be done well, but it seems to almost never be done well.

JS-heavy approaches are not compatible with long-term performance goals In reality, for any decently sized JS-heavy project, you should expect that what you build will be slower than advertised, it will keep getting slower over time while it sees ongoing work, and it will take more effort to develop and especially to maintain than what you were led to believe, with as many bugs as any other approach.

Critical Security Vulnerability in React Server Components On November 29th, Lachlan Davidson reported a security vulnerability in React that allows unauthenticated remote code execution [...] This vulnerability was disclosed as CVE-2025-55182 and is rated CVSS 10.0.

Why use React? By default, you get the dreaded hydration pattern—do all the computing on the server in JavaScript (yay!), serve up HTML straight away (yay! yay!) …and then serve up all the same JavaScript that’s on the server anyway (ya—wait, what?).

I Built the Same App 10 Times: Evaluating Frameworks for Mobile Performance React’s mobile strategy inherently drives teams toward platform capture. The web offers an alternative: no gatekeepers, no platform fees, direct distribution.

Is it Time to Regulate React? React’s core failure is compounded by confusing API design for which documentation is indecisive, essays are written, and correct usage is endlessly debated.

React Won by Default – And It's Killing Frontend Innovation When teams need a new frontend, the conversation rarely starts with “What are the constraints and which tool best fits them?” It often starts with “Let’s use React; everyone knows React.” That reflex creates a self-perpetuating cycle where network effects, rather than technical fit, decide architecture.

The React Blog Post: Reflections and Reactions To dismiss this entire problem as a "skill issue" and imply all is good now because an external library solved an issue that React will allow you to do is very curious to me. [...] You would think you can come back to a technology after three years and still be able to work on it - I mean, how much can it change? In any other stack, that might be true, but in frontend development, and React especially so - it's too naive to think that.

Tech Founder? Entrepreneur? This is why you should avoid React.js in your app React isn’t just slow — it’s a bloated ecosystem with technical debt baked into its DNA. Yet despite this, it keeps being chosen. Why?

React Still Feels Insane And No One Is Talking About It It would be too easy to just say React is, well, downright insane, and go on with our lives. But as reasonable primates, I believe we can do better. We can try to understand it.

Conferences, Clarity, and Smokescreens My day-to-day consulting work, along with high-visibility industry data, shows that the React community is mired in a deep, measurable quality crisis. But attendees of React Summit who didn't already know wouldn't hear about it.

Next.js 15.1+ is unusable outside of Vercel Next.js has become a Vercel vendor lock-in disguised as an open-source framework. Save yourself the headache and choose something else for your "next" project.

Why Silicon Valley CTOs Are Secretly Moving Away from React Several CTOs mentioned a surprising problem: while React developers are plentiful, truly skilled ones who understand the deeper patterns are increasingly rare and expensive. [...] Several companies reported that their most experienced engineers were getting frustrated with the growing complexity and leaving for roles using other technologies.

HTML is better than React!? [...] baseline HTML that gets progressively enhanced into something better when JS is available… 1. Gives people a more usable experience earlier in the process. 2. Ensures that on slow connections your site doesn’t seem like trash. 3. Means that if something goes wrong, people can still use your site.

You should know this before choosing Next.js Last weekend, Vercel disclosed a critical security vulnerability with Next.js. This type of issue is normal, but the way Vercel chose to handle it was so poor, reckless and disrespectful to the community that it has exacerbated my concerns about the governance of the project.

Stop Using and Recommending React I have used React for a long time. Trust me when I tell you: There is no reason to use it and a lot of reasons against it.

Moving on from React, a Year Later Maybe it’s the changing interest rates or political winds, but I think the “fat client” era JS-heavy frontends is on its way out. The hype around edge applications is misplaced and unnecessary for building many different flavors of successful businesses. Many interactions are not possible without JavaScript, but that doesn’t mean we should look to write more than we have to.

If Not React, Then What? Frameworkism preaches that the way to improve user experiences is to adopt more (or different) tooling from the framework's ecosystem. This provides adherents with something to do that looks plausibly like engineering, except it isn't. It can even become a totalising commitment; solutions to user problems outside the framework's expanded cinematic universe are unavailable to the frameworkist.

I don't have time to learn React React proponents might claim that React will teach you modern UI, but from what I've seen it barely copes with modern UI. autofocus is broken, custom elements don't work in all but the experimental version, using any "modern" features like dialog or popovers requires useEffect, and the synthetic event system teaches you so little about how DOM actually works. This isn't modern UI, it's UI from 2013 at its inception.

Liskov’s Gun: The parallel evolution of React and Web Components React has become a bloated carcass of false promises, misleading claims, and unending layers of backwards compatibility – the wrong kind of backwards compatibility, as they still occasionally break your fucking code when updating.

How to build a counter component using the HTML Framework in just 1 line of code Locate your /node_modules folder and drag it to the trash bin.

The Neverending Story Applets. ActiveX. Flash. Flex. Silverlight. Angular. React. Plenty of corporations thought they knew better but failed to see the larger picture.

What Is React.js? Its proponents can be weird, it takes itself far too seriously, and its documentation is interminable. These are some ways that some people have described Christianity. This video is about React.js.

Reckoning: Part 4 — The Way Out Refuse to go along with plans to build YAJSD (Yet Another JavaScript Disaster). Engineering leaders look to their senior engineers for trusted guidance about what technologies to adopt. When someone inevitably proposes the React rewrite, do not be silent.

After a Decade of React, Is Frontend a Post-React World Now? If you’re a new web developer entering the profession, you might even consider eschewing React altogether — although admittedly, that will diminish your short-term job prospects. But it’s at least an option to seriously consider, and might even help you land a job with a forward-thinking employer.

Pivoting From React to Native DOM APIs: A Real World Example One dev team made the shift from React’s "overwhelming VDOM" to modern DOM APIs. They immediately saw speed and interaction improvements.

How React 19 (Almost) Made the Internet Slower After a lot of public pushback, heated discussions, and probably a good deal of talking behind the scenes, the React team backed out and decided to hold off on this change for now.

An even faster Microsoft Edge moving away from React to a modern Web Components + HTML-first architecture has had a *huge* benefit for users, particularly folks on low-end hardware

React, Electron, and LLMs have a common purpose: the labour arbitrage theory of dev tool popularity React is, for the vast, vast majority of organisations making web-facing software, objectively worse than many of the alternatives.

We Rewrote our React App in Svelte in Three We