alt Hacker NewsThe cycle isn't short like people continue to say each year. I use react since 2014 and it hasn't changed much in 6-7 years.
I just built a script tag based reusable library for our company with react as the only dependency and thanks to stuff like shadow Dom and dialogs I get a much higher quality dev experience than plain js.
Replies
I have react projects from less than 6-7 years ago that are bit-rotted because of changes to react. I have wanted to add features but can't because I don't have the time to fix everything that rotted.
To be clear, it's not 100% react. It's the entire ecosystem around it. Want to take wigdet-x v3 for bug fixes. It requires newer react, which may or may not be compatible with widget-z I'm using. Newer react requires newer tools which aren't compatible with the configuration that was created by create-react-app from 2 versions ago. etc...
Exactly what are you using in React land that has lasted for 6-7 years. No components to hooks transition? No styling library changes? No state management changes? No meta framework changes? The React ecosystem is the least stable thing I have ever worked with.
Best practises have changed dramatically in React since 2014 though. It’s easy to say “oh you don’t have to use hooks, you can keep using class components” but that’s not really true when the entire ecosystem is pivoting.
My bigger problem with React is that it ends up being used as a form of vendor lock in. Once your entire page is in the React VDOM it’s very, very difficult to pivot to a different framework piece by piece. That’s a core strength of web components.