alt Hacker NewsReact is very similar to PHP in this regard. PHP has (had?) several major design flaws, and yet it became the default for people with less experience.
I don't think that React is as problematic as PHP ever was, and also frameworks like Laravel have improved the PHP experience tremendously, so there is now a way for less experienced people to use it.
IMO: the problem here is pretending that everyone has an innate right to use React right when it's clearly a library that works better when people have a bit more experience than the average web dev.
We as an industry tell people "don't do your own crypto, it's hard to get it right". We don't blame crypto for being hard, or demand new frameworks. Same for things like assembly, C++, Rust, formal proofs, writing an OS, operating BGP infrastructure, etc.
But with React it has to be "kid gloves on", otherwise it's shit?
This is perhaps a bigger problem in our industry: lack of experience is not seem as an individual problem, and we blame-shift, blame marketing, blame Facebook, Dan Abramov, trends...
Perhaps we should be saying "React is not for beginners", same as "don't do crypto".
Replies
> We don't blame crypto for being hard, or demand new frameworks
This is not true. There are innumerable cryptography libraries whose primary reason for existence was to replace or offer an alternative to a library with the same affordances but with primitives that were too easy to use incorrectly. “Maybe we should redesign this knife so it’s hard to slice a finger off” is not unique to web dev
Web dev is special. The industry has spent the last 20 years sacrificing almost everything to make building web sites more beginner friendly. There is an expectation that the "full-stack" (everything between node and react) should be effortless, that is absent from other fields. "one click to deploy" in not a thing in crypto, in embedded or in kernel dev, for instance; whereas it's expected that a junior web dev is productive from day one. That's just normal industrialization, specializing jobs and then making them simpler, starting where the numbers are larger.
Ironically, piling up simplistic technologies have created quite complex houses of cards in places. HTTP itself being the most obvious example of a tech meant to be simple and quick to grasp that morphed into a super complex, ineficient and insecure gremlin of which nobody who is not a specialist (or an AI) has a full picture anymore.