Frameworks were supposed to free us from the messy parts of the web. For a while they did, until their gravity started drawing everything else into orbit.
Every framework brought with it real progress. React, Vue, Angular, Svelte, and others all gave structure, composability, and predictability to frontend work. But now, after a decade of React dominance, something else has happened. We haven’t just built apps with React, we’ve built an entire ecosystem around it—hiring pipelines, design systems, even companies—all bound to its way of thinking.
The problem isn’t React itself, nor any other framework for that matter. The problem is the inertia that sets in once any framework becomes infrastructure. By that point, it’s “too important to fail,” and everything nearby turns out to be just fragile enough to prove it.
The Gravity of Success
React is no longer just a library. It’s a full ecosystem that defines how frontend developers are allowed to think.
Its success has created its own kind of gravity, and the more we’ve built within it, the harder it’s become to break free.
Teams standardize on it because it’s safe: it’s been proven to work at massive scale, the talent pool is large, and the tooling is mature. That’s a rational choice, but it also means React exerts institutional gravity. Moving off it stops being an engineering decision and becomes an organizational risk instead. Solutions to problems tend to be found within its orbit, because stepping outside it feels like drifting into deep space.
We saw this cycle with jQuery in the past, and we’re seeing it again now with React. We’ll see it with whatever comes next. Success breeds standardization, standardization breeds inertia, and inertia convinces us that progress can wait. It’s the pattern itself that’s the problem, not any single framework.
But right now, React sits at the center of this dynamic, and the stakes are far higher than they ever were with jQuery. Entire product lines, architectural decisions, and career paths now depend on React-shaped assumptions. We’ve even started defining developers by their framework: many job listings ask for “React developers” instead of frontend engineers. Even AI coding agents default to React when asked to start a new frontend project, unless deliberately steered elsewhere.
Perhaps the only thing harder than building on a framework is admitting you might need to build without one.
Evolution and Innovation
React’s evolution captures this tension perfectly. Recent milestones include the creation of the React Foundation, the React Compiler reaching v1.0, and new additions in React 19.2 such as the <Activity /> component, useEffectEvent, Performance Tracks in DevTools, and experimental <ViewTransition /> and Fragment Refs.
These updates represent tangible improvements. Especially the compiler, which brings automatic memoization at build time, eliminating the need for manual useMemo and useCallback optimization. Production deployments show real performance wins using it: apps in the Meta Quest Store saw up to 2.5x faster interactions as a direct result. This kind of automatic optimization is genuinely valuable work that pushes the entire ecosystem forward.
But here’s the thing: the web platform has been quietly heading in the same direction for years, building many of the same capabilities frameworks have been racing to add.
Browsers now ship View Transitions, Container Queries, and smarter scheduling primitives. The platform keeps evolving at a fair pace, but most teams won’t touch these capabilities until React officially wraps them in a hook or they show up in Next.js docs.
Innovation keeps happening right across the ecosystem, but for many it only becomes “real” once React validates the approach. Which is fine, assuming you enjoy waiting for permission to use the platform you’re already building on.
The React Foundation and the Question of Priorities
The React Foundation represents an important milestone for governance and sustainability. This new foundation is a part of the Linux Foundation, and founding members include Meta, Vercel, Microsoft, Amazon, Expo, Callstack, and Software Mansion.
This is genuinely good for React’s long-term health, providing better governance and removing the risk of being owned by a single company. It ensures React can outlive any one organization’s priorities.
But it doesn’t fundamentally change the development dynamic of the framework. Yet.
The engineers who actually build React still work at companies like Meta and Vercel. The research still happens at that scale, driven by those performance needs. The roadmap still reflects the priorities of the companies that fund full-time development.
And to be fair, React operates at a scale most frameworks will never encounter. Meta serves billions of users through frontends that run on constrained mobile devices around the world, so it needs performance at a level that justifies dedicated research teams. The innovations they produce, including compiler-driven optimization, concurrent rendering, and increasingly fine-grained performance tooling, solve real problems that exist only at that kind of massive scale.
But those priorities aren’t necessarily your priorities, and that’s the tension. React’s innovations are shaped by the problems faced by companies running apps at billions-of-users scale, not necessarily the problems faced by teams building for thousands or millions.
Signals in the Lab: Research at Enterprise Scale
React’s internal research reveals the team’s awareness of current architectural limitations. Experimental projects like Forest explore signal-like lazy computation graphs; essentially fine-grained reactivity instead of React’s coarse re-render model. Another project, Fir , investigates incremental rendering techniques.
These aren’t roadmap items; they’re just research prototypes happening inside Meta. They may never ship publicly. But they do reveal something important: React’s team knows the virtual DOM model has performance ceilings and they’re actively exploring what comes after it.
This is good research, but it also illustrates the same dynamic at play again: that these explorations happen behind the walls of Big Tech, on timelines set by corporate priorities and resource availability. Meanwhile, frameworks like Solid and Qwik have been shipping production-ready fine-grained reactivity for years. Svelte 5 shipped runes in 2024, bringing signals to mainstream adoption.
The gap isn’t technical capability, but rather when the industry feels permission to adopt it. For many teams, that permission only comes once React validates the approach. This is true regardless of who governs the project or what else exists in the ecosystem.
What React Got Right
I don’t want this critique to take away from what React has achieved over the past twelve years.
React popularized declarative UIs and made component-based architecture mainstream, which was a huge deal in itself. It proved that developer experience matters as much as runtime performance and introduced the idea that UI could be a pure function of input props and state. That shift made complex interfaces far easier to reason about. Later additions like hooks solved the earlier class component mess elegantly, and concurrent rendering through <Suspense /> opened new possibilities for truly responsive UIs.
The React team’s research into compiler optimization, server components, and fine-grained rendering pushes the entire ecosystem forward. This is true even when other frameworks ship similar ideas first. There’s value in seeing how these patterns work at Meta’s scale.
The critique isn’t that React is bad, but that treating any single framework as infrastructure creates blind spots in how we think and build. When React becomes the lens through which we see the web, we stop noticing what the platform itself can already do, and we stop reaching for native solutions because we’re waiting for the framework-approved version to show up first.
And crucially, switching to Solid, Svelte, or Vue wouldn’t eliminate this dynamic; it would only shift its center of gravity. Every framework creates its own orbit of tools, patterns, and dependencies. The goal isn’t to find the “right” framework, but to build applications resilient enough to survive migration to any framework, including those that haven’t been invented yet.
Inertia and Cultural Limitations
This inertia isn’t about laziness; it’s about logistics. Switching stacks is expensive and disruptive. Retraining developers, rebuilding component libraries, and retooling CI pipelines all take time and money, and the payoff is rarely immediate. It’s high risk, high cost, and hard to justify, so most companies stay put, and honestly, who can blame them?
But while we stay put, the platform keeps moving. The browser can stream and hydrate progressively, animate transitions natively, and coordinate rendering work without a framework. Yet most development teams won’t touch those capabilities until they’re built in or officially blessed by the ecosystem.
That isn’t an engineering limitation; it’s a cultural one. We’ve somehow made “works in all browsers” feel riskier than “works in our framework.”
Better governance doesn’t solve this. The problem isn’t React’s organizational structure; it’s our relationship to it. Too many teams wait for React to package and approve platform capabilities before adopting them, even when those same features already exist in browsers today.
The <Activity /> Component: Formalization vs. Innovation
React 19.2’s <Activity /> component captures this pattern perfectly. It serves as a boundary that hides UI while preserving component state and unmounting effects. When set to mode="hidden", it pauses subscriptions, timers, and network requests while keeping form inputs and scroll positions intact. When revealed again by setting mode="visible", those effects remount cleanly.
It’s a genuinely useful feature. Tabbed interfaces, modals, and progressive rendering all benefit from it, and the same idea extends to cases where you want to pre-render content in the background or preserve state as users navigate between views. It integrates smoothly with React’s lifecycle and <Suspense /> boundaries, enabling selective hydration and smarter rendering strategies.
But it also draws an important line between formalization and innovation.
The core concept isn’t new; it’s simply about pausing side effects while maintaining state. Similar behavior can already be built with visibility observers, effect cleanup, and careful state management patterns. The web platform even provides the primitives for it through tools like IntersectionObserver, DOM state preservation, and manual effect control.
What <Activity /> adds is formalization and coordination with React’s internals. It’s easier to use, harder to misuse, and integrates cleanly with features like <Suspense />. Yet it also exposes how dependent our thinking has become on frameworks. We wait for React to formalize platform behaviors instead of reaching for them directly.
This isn’t a criticism of <Activity /> itself; it’s a well-designed API that solves a real problem. But it serves as a reminder that we’ve grown comfortable waiting for framework solutions to problems the platform already lets us solve. After orbiting React for so long, we’ve forgotten what it feels like to build without its pull.
Platform First Thinking
The answer isn’t necessarily to abandon your framework, but to remember that it runs inside the web, not the other way around. I’ve written before about building the web in islands as one way to rediscover platform capabilities we already have.
Even within React’s constraints, you can still think platform first:
- Use native forms and form submissions to a server, then enhance with client-side logic
- Prefer semantic HTML and ARIA before reaching for component libraries
- Try View Transitions directly with minimal React wrappers instead of waiting for an official API
- Use Web Components for self-contained widgets that could survive a framework migration
- Keep business logic framework-agnostic, plain TypeScript modules rather than hooks, and aim to keep your hooks short by pulling logic from outside React
- Profile performance using browser DevTools first and React DevTools second
- Try native CSS features like
:has(),@layer, scroll snap,@container, andprefers-reduced-motionbefore adding JavaScript solutions - Use
fetch,FormData, andURLSearchParamsinstead of framework-specific alternatives wherever possible - Experiment with the History API (
pushState,popstate) directly before reaching for React Router - Structure code so routing, data fetching, and state management can be swapped out independently of React
- Test against real browser APIs and behaviors, not just framework abstractions
These aren’t anti-React practices, they’re portable practices that make your web app more resilient. They let you adopt new browser capabilities as soon as they ship, not months later when they’re wrapped in a hook. They make framework migration feasible rather than catastrophic.
When you build this way, React becomes a rendering library that happens to be excellent at its job, not the foundation everything else has to depend on.
Freedom Beyond Frameworks
A React app that respects the platform can outlast React itself.
When you treat React as an implementation detail instead of an identity, your architecture becomes portable. When you embrace progressive enhancement and web semantics, your ideas survive the next framework wave.
The recent wave of changes, including the React Foundation, React Compiler v1.0, the <Activity /> component, and internal research into alternative architectures, all represent genuine progress. The React team is doing thoughtful work, but these updates also serve as reminders of how tightly the industry has become coupled to a single ecosystem’s timeline. That timeline is still dictated by the engineering priorities of large corporations, and that remains true regardless of who governs the project.
If your team’s evolution depends on a single framework’s roadmap, you are not steering your product; you are waiting for permission to move.
That is true whether you are using React, Vue, Angular, or Svelte. The framework does not matter; the dependency does. It is ironic that we spent years escaping jQuery’s gravity, only to end up caught in another orbit.
Reclaim the Platform
React was once the radical idea that changed how we build for the web. Every successful framework reaches this point eventually, when it shifts from innovation to institution, from tool to assumption. jQuery did it, React did it, and something else will do it next.
The React Foundation is a positive step for the project’s long-term sustainability, but the next real leap forward will not come from better governance. It will not come from React finally adopting signals either, and it will not come from any single framework “getting it right.”
Progress will come from developers who remember that frameworks are implementation details, not identities.
Build for the platform first.
Choose frameworks second.
The web isn’t React’s, it isn’t Vue’s, and it isn’t Svelte’s. It belongs to no one. If we remember that, it will stay free to evolve at its own pace, drawing the best ideas from everywhere rather than from whichever framework happens to hold the cultural high ground.
Frameworks are scaffolding, not the building. Escaping their gravity does not mean abandoning progress; it means finding enough momentum to keep moving.
Reaching escape velocity, one project at a time.
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