Global state management is often one of the first architectural decisions made in Vue applications. With tools like Pinia, sharing state across components has never been easier.
But while global stores feel convenient and powerful, they come with hidden costs that often appear only as the application grows. Overusing global state can lead to tight coupling, unnecessary reactivity, performance regressions, and codebases that are harder to reason about.
Global stores are not inherently bad — but they are frequently overused.
In this article, we’ll explore:
- Why global stores feel so attractive at first
- Common ways Pinia is misused in real-world Vue apps
- How dependency creep sneaks into your architecture
- Performance implications of global reactivity
- When global stores are still worth it
Enjoy!
🤔 Why Global Stores Feel So Convenient
Global stores solve a real problem: sharing state across distant parts of your application.
With Pinia, you get:
- A centralized place for state
- Excellent DevTools integration
- Type safety
- Simple APIs for actions and getters
Typical valid use cases include:
- Authentication and user sessions
- Feature flags
- Global UI preferences (theme, locale)
- Shared cached API data
- Notifications and toasts
Problems start when a global store becomes the default place for all state, instead of a deliberate architectural choice.
🟢 The Hidden Costs of Overusing Global Stores
Pinia Misuse: When Everything Becomes Global
A very common anti-pattern is placing local or temporary state into Pinia just because it’s available.
Examples include:
- Modal open/close state
- Form input values
- Page-specific filters
- Temporary loading flags
This leads to:
- Bloated stores
- Unclear ownership of state
- More indirection than necessary
- Harder refactoring later on
If a piece of state only belongs to a single component tree or route, keeping it local is often simpler and healthier.
Dependency Creep and Tight Coupling
Every time a component imports a store, it introduces an implicit dependency.
That component is now coupled to:
- The store’s structure
- Its internal logic
- Its side effects
- Its lifecycle
Over time:
- Components become harder to reuse
- Tests require more mocking
- Changes in one store ripple across the app
What starts as convenience slowly turns into architectural gravity, pulling unrelated concerns into the same global layer.
Performance Implications of Global Reactivity
Global stores are reactive by default.
That means:
- Any reactive property can trigger updates
- Any component using the store participates in its dependency graph
Issues arise when:
- Large objects are stored globally
- Stores are deeply reactive without need
- Components subscribe to more state than they actually use
This can cause:
- Unnecessary re-renders
- Expensive computed recalculations
- Subtle performance regressions
While tools like shallowRef or store splitting can help, the best optimization is often not globalizing state in the first place.
Losing Intent and Domain Boundaries
When everything lives in a global store, nothing feels special anymore.
Stores should represent domain-level concepts, not act as generic data buckets. Overusing them blurs the line between:
- UI state and business logic
- Temporary and persistent data
- Local concerns and application-wide concerns
Clear intent is usually the first thing lost in over-globalized architectures.
🟢 When Global Stores Are Still Worth It
Despite all of this, global stores are absolutely the right tool in many cases.
They shine when:
- State must persist across routes
- Multiple distant components depend on the same data
- Centralized caching or synchronization is required
- Debugging via DevTools matters
- State truly represents an application-wide concern
The key is scope discipline:
- Keep stores small and focused
- Avoid dumping UI-only state into them
- Expose minimal reactive surface
- Treat stores as part of your public API
Global stores are powerful — but power requires restraint.
📖 Learn more
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✅ Summary
Global stores are neither good nor bad by default — they’re contextual tools. Used intentionally, they simplify your architecture. Used carelessly, they quietly erode it.
Take care!
And happy coding as always 🖥️
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