but I cannot believe I am reading these words from someone who seems to have a deep understanding of this space:
Your judgement is largely informed by your perception of the impact that React had on the Web as a whole.
But the quote talks about:
the React team
UIs in general
…outside of the high-management-maturity organisations in which they were born … tight latency budgeting, dedicated performance teams, hawkish management reviews, ship gates to prevent regressions, and end-to-end measurements of critical user journeys. They understood the only way to scale JS-driven frontends are massive investments in controlling complexity…
i.e. the React team developed a solution inside of Facebook/Meta that the organization could sustain while addressing concerns that were unique to that particular organization.
And whether or not it was deliberate from the very beginning or just a happy accident from July 2013 onwards the emergence of React Native set certain architectural decisions in stone which the web team had to accept as permanent constraints from that point on and work around.
React wasn't about the web but React was about React/Native.
Now the React Community is an entirely separate component.
Unrelated but I think this has strong parallels:
Object-oriented development is good at providing a human oriented representation of the problem in the source code, but bad at providing a machine representation of the solution. It is bad at providing a framework for creating an optimal solution…
They like working with React (and the cornucopia of support packages) so much that's it's become their golden hammer—even when it's not an optimal solution to their problem or the operating environment (the web). And the effort to acquire the necessary skills with that ecosystem is an investment they seek to protect and maintain (Fire and Motion).
The problem is an industry rife with faulty thinking that assumes (a) popular technology is popular because it’s good…
Your judgement is largely informed by your perception of the impact that React had on the Web as a whole.
But the quote talks about:
The Market for Lemons (2023)
i.e. the React team developed a solution inside of Facebook/Meta that the organization could sustain while addressing concerns that were unique to that particular organization.
And whether or not it was deliberate from the very beginning or just a happy accident from July 2013 onwards the emergence of React Native set certain architectural decisions in stone which the web team had to accept as permanent constraints from that point on and work around.
React wasn't about the web but React was about React/Native.
Now the React Community is an entirely separate component.
Unrelated but I think this has strong parallels:
Mapping the problem (Data-Oriented Design, 2008)
They like working with React (and the cornucopia of support packages) so much that's it's become their golden hammer—even when it's not an optimal solution to their problem or the operating environment (the web). And the effort to acquire the necessary skills with that ecosystem is an investment they seek to protect and maintain (Fire and Motion).
The Great Gaslighting of the JavaScript Era (2023)