Latency creeps in, bugs multiply, teams lose confidence, and “small changes” start taking days instead of hours.
This isn’t about React being bad.
It’s about how poor React decisions compound over time.
🚧 What actually went wrong in production
Early on, the app felt fast. Features shipped quickly. Everyone was happy.
Then scale arrived.
User count grew
API traffic spiked
UI complexity increased
Multiple engineers touched the same code paths
That’s when cracks turned into outages.
Not because of one big mistake, but because of many small, ignored ones.
🔁 Re-rendering without discipline
Components re-rendering on every keystroke
Props changing shape every render
On lower-end devices and real networks? Painful.
Lesson: Rendering is not free. React makes it easy to re-render, not cheap.
⏱️ No debouncing, no throttling, no mercy
Search inputs hitting APIs on every keypress.
Scroll events firing dozens of times per second.
The backend started looking like the problem.
It wasn’t.
Lesson: Frontend inefficiency scales faster than backend cost.
🧠 State management without a strategy
No single mental model.
Bug fixes required tracing state across five layers of components.
Lesson: State chaos doesn’t show up in demos — it shows up during incidents.
🌗 No theming, no single source of truth
Hardcoded colors. Inline styles. Repeated constants.
When branding changes came in, it turned into a multi-day refactor.
Lesson: If a value appears in more than one place, it’s already a liability.
🔌 API calls scattered everywhere
Every component knew how to talk to the backend.
Different error handling. Different retries. Different headers.
When auth logic changed, the blast radius was massive.
Lesson: No single point of change means every change is risky.
🧱 File structure that doesn’t scale
Flat folders. No boundaries. No ownership.
New engineers took weeks to become productive.
Senior engineers became bottlenecks.
Lesson: File structure is an architecture decision, not a formatting preference.
📦 No code splitting, no lazy loading
The initial bundle kept growing.
Users felt it before metrics did.
Lesson: Performance debt compounds invisibly, until users leave.
🧩 The real mistake
Lack of planning for scale, assuming React would “handle it” later.
React gives you enough rope to hang your product if you’re careless.
🧠 What I do differently now
Treat rendering cost as a first-class concern
Design state flow before writing components
Centralize API interaction aggressively
Plan file structure for future teams, not current comfort
Optimize for change, not just delivery speed
This isn’t over-engineering.
It’s respect for production.
Final thought
Most frontend failures are labeled as “performance issues” or “React problems.”
In reality, they’re engineering maturity problems.
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