React anyone? - here's my rant

[gebeer]

Hi fellow devs,

this is a somewhat different post, a little essay. Take it with a grain of salt and some humor. Maybe some of you share similar experience.

I don't really mean to poop on a certain group with certain preferences, but then, that's what I'm doing here. I needed to write it to load off some frustration.

No offense intended.

Good Sunday read :-)

React Is NPC Technology

Have you ever really looked at React code? Not the tutorial. Not the "Hello World." An actual production component from an actual codebase someone is actually proud of? Because the first time I did, I thought there'd been a mistake. A failed merge. HTML bleeding into JavaScript, strings that weren't strings, logic and markup performing some kind of violation you'd normally catch in code review before it got anywhere near main. "Fix this," I thought. "Someone broke this."

It looks broken because it is broken. That's the first thing you need to understand.

JSX is a category error. Mixing markup and logic at the syntax level - not as an abstraction, not behind an interface, but visually, literally, right there in the file - is the kind of decision that should have ended careers. Instead it ended up on 40% of job postings. And here's the part that actually matters, the part that explains everything:

Nobody can tell you why.

"Everyone uses it." Go ahead, ask. That's the answer. That's the complete sentence, delivered with the confidence of someone who has never once questioned whether a thing should exist before learning how it works. The argument for React is React's market share. The case for Next.js is that your tech lead saw it on a conference talk in 2021 and it was already too late. You're supposed to hear this and nod - because if everyone's doing something, there must be a reason, right?

The herd doesn't just run toward cliffs. Except. That's literally what herds do.

The web development community, bless its heart, has a category of decision I can only call NPC behavior. Not an insult - a technical description. An NPC doesn't evaluate options. An NPC reads the room, finds the dominant pattern, and propagates it. React is on every job posting = React is what employers want = React is what I need to know = React is what I reach for. The loop closes. Nobody along the chain asked if it was right. They asked if it was safe. Safe to put on a resume. Safe to recommend. Safe to defend at the standup. React is the framework you choose when you've stopped choosing and started inheriting.

The 10% who actually think about their tools - they're out there running Alpine.js. Which is 8kb. Does the same job. No build step required. Add an attribute, the thing works. Revolutionary concept. They're running htmx, which understood something profound: the web already has a protocol for moving data, and it was fine. You didn't need to rebuild HTTP in JavaScript. You just needed to reach for the right thing instead of the fashionable one.

Let's talk performance, because "everyone uses it" is already bad enough before you look at what it actually does.

React ships 40-100kb of runtime JavaScript before your application does a single thing. Your users wait while React bootstraps itself. Then it hydrates - a word that sounds refreshing and means "React redoes on the client what the server already did, because React can't help it." Then they invented Server Components to fix the problem of shipping too much JavaScript. The solution: ship different JavaScript, handled differently, with new mental models, new abstractions, new ways to get it wrong.

They called it an innovation.

I once worked with WordPress and React together. I want you to sit with that. Two philosophies, neither of which is actually correct, stacked on each other like a complexity casserole nobody ordered. WordPress solving 2003's problems with 2003's patterns. React solving 2003's problems with 2013's patterns that created 2023's problems. Together they achieved something genuinely special: all the drawbacks of both, and none of the advantages of either. The PHP you want but in a different way and the hydration you couldn't prevent, serving pages that load like it's apologizing for something.

Twenty years building for the web and I've watched frameworks rise and fall like geological events. ColdFusion, anyone? Remember when Java applets were going to be everywhere? Flash was going to be the web. Then jQuery saved us. Then Angular saved us from jQuery. Then React saved us from Angular. Rescue upon rescue, each one leaving more complexity than it cleared, each one defended by exactly the same people who defended the last one, now wearing a different conference lanyard.

ProcessWire. That's what I build with. Most developers have never heard of it - which is not a criticism, that's the evidence. You find ProcessWire because you went looking for something specific, evaluated it, and it fit. It doesn't have conference talks. It doesn't have a VC-funded developer relations team. It has a forum full of people who chose it. That's a different category of thing entirely.

The same 10% who finds ProcessWire finds Alpine. Finds htmx. Makes decisions that don't optimize for defensibility in interviews. Builds websites that load fast because they don't carry React around everywhere they go.

There's a physics concept called a local minimum. A place where a system settles because the immediate neighborhood looks stable - the energy gradient points upward in every direction, so the system stops. Stays. Convinces itself it's home. Even if a global minimum exists somewhere else, at lower energy, lighter, simpler - you'd have to climb first, and the herd doesn't climb.

React is a local minimum. The web settled here when it got tired of looking. Stable enough. Defended by enough career investment. Surrounded by enough tooling and tutorials and framework-specific bootcamps that switching costs feel existential. The ground state - simpler, faster, closer to what the web actually is - sits somewhere else, past a hill that looks too steep from inside the valley.

The ground state is always simpler. That's not a philosophical position. That's thermodynamics.

They don't want you to know that.