React's becoming a bit weird...

I am curious what kind of feedback you may be hearing from people who are newbies or just getting started in trying to develop. Wonder if they notice the changes, as something that detracts from their ability to "on-ramp" to the frontend development space in a reasonable amount of time. Maybe they don't notice it at all?

Picked up Vue last year and haven’t looked back

Very intuitive and solid APIs

Valid concerns (implied) raised here, and it's a definite concern for me w/ how in bed react is w/ vercel/nextjs. More than anything else, this could be what drives me away from using React.

That doesn't make sense for me: first of all, it forces everyone to use node/typescript on backend - why? Second of all, I don't consider Next.js mature enough, there are many, many areas in this framework that has been designed quite badly compared to older, not-so-facny backend solutions.

Overall, it feels strange that I had countless conversations in the past when I called react a framework ("it's a library!") and now this "library" is enforcing me how to write my backend, lol.

Vercel will eventually be the death of React.

I believe that React has became more stable like a programming language. If anything, i am fine with it. Receiving new updates constantly was such a pain in the behind. You're spreading panic man.

Hard no from me. Just wasted my Xmas holidays and what’s left of Jan bringing our apps “up to date” for no actual gain

Going to bite the bullet, embrace the pain, and redo everything in htmx + vanilla web components

Even if it takes all year, and costs job security

Switching to Angular/Vue may help the community. Comapnies stop being pushed towards NextJs

this is really concerning about the future of React.. it should be up to DEVS to decide wether or not to use framework and it shouldn't be imposed.... i somehow wont be surprise if there are some sort of financial benefit by doing so but again you will destroy the trust of the community in the process

I dont agree with your logic Max. React it is a standalone frontend library(you can build SPA just using React), nextjs is an extension than can be used by users but it is not required in the frontend.

I always thought SPA trend is not wise. It was usefull to develop office 365 but should not be used for most websites.

What react team does, makes sense.
Next JS makes sense, it is great. Why would you use pure react.
You can use client components only when it makes sense.

There are certain advantages and drawbacks of meta framework dependant approach. I think the biggest drawback is newcomers might be having difficulties to learn React. This may not be a huge deal today but React’s lifespan will be shortened in long term. I think RSC does not bring a huge advantage for taking that kind of risk.

This guy talked in a circle for 8 minutes.

React is changing things just for the sake of it to make the developers maintaining it feel important. There's no point in going back and forth between client and server rendering. If people decide that it's not ideal to have everything ssr in idk 2 years or so you'll have "new react" being the same it was a year ago today.

Despite how awesome Next.js, Remix, or other metaframeworks are, I still prefer to create my project in React with Vite. It gives me that stability and peace of mind.

Fuck React, embrace HTMX

indeed a bit weird

All these frameworks are shit. They’ve just deskilled already unskilled HTML authors who think themselves “engineers”.

They can’t write code.

I think it's a good thing that the pace of releases has slowed down. I mean, isn't it working OK right now? 😅 The only thing I would LOVE to see from React team is React Forget compiler which I think is going to be a huge shift and make React a near perfect library.

Even more flexibility than before, that a good news.

Imho this entire movement towards next.js and hype around it was a very wrong turn... Now you just have server components and client components, so instead of concentrating on your app architecture you are now just trying to make frameworks happy and spending most of the time just so server & client components composition works. Even if composing them sometimes makes no sense at all...

So we now have a framework built on top of framework (yes I know react is more a library, not a framework, but you got the idea, right?)
Let alone next.js trend to include "canary" non production ready things...

It's probably a good time to look into smth like vue or svelte.

I’ve been developing web apps in various stacks for about 25 years now, and what goes around, comes around. We’re back to SSR but with SPA characteristics and UX. I watch the discussions out there and a lot of devs seem to feel like Next pushes Vercel services too hard, and we’re sort of being forced into doing business with them. I think a lot of people feel like Facebook was a better ward of the project than having so many cooks in the kitchen. I’ve been using React since the start and have invested a great deal of time into it. When I see rumblings like this, it’s usually about the time a technology is displaced by something newer and better. Maybe that’s something like web components + HTMX, Svelte, Lit, or something even more radical. WASM? Anyhow, it’s too bad the JS universe never seems to mature. It has made things much more complicated than they have to be.

I dont like vercel and next js because vercel wants you get in their ecosystem

Just move to Svelte

I think React as a library focused on building SPAs is incredible (same feeling for a large part of its ecosystem).
That being said, I don't like this move from the core team to address backend stuff with RSC.
If your company is 100% in JS, this might make sense. Otherwise, if for various reasons your company uses other languages, it is strange to see a client-side library changing focus in this way.
Backend capabilities can be (and are) provided by many different JS frameworks. Why would the core React team put their efforts into backend features instead of putting those efforts into making React SPA better and simpler? In that regard Vue looks much more consistent with its original goals.

This modern (and complex) SSR movement makes me think if a considerable amount of applications wouldn't be better served if using a simpler approach, using other programming languages in the backend and libraries like Unpoly, Hotwire, Alpine or HTMX in the frontend.

Furthermore, given that React (in some ways) is becoming Next.js (Vercel), and many startups are going all-in on this boat, it seems that in a few years the industry will face massive vendor lock-in.

We’ll get a new framework or library that solves this problem pretty soon and react will be of the past. It’ll be a library or framework that just does what we already do with react and next together. I really love react but I might not mind something new

Never did much React, but after Angular, Vue and Nuxt, I think I don't need to start. It's just insane amount of boilerplate and doesn't seem maintainable at all like Angular. Nuxt is excellent as well, much simpler to use than Angular and has no problems like React does.

Nah Im a svelter.

you know, every js framework gets weirder and weirder and eventually gets replaced by something else shiny new. This is a fantastic tradition in js.

react itself is a framework (and a really ctyptic shitty one) you talk about it as it was a language or idk

Vue 3 any day. A stable, yet fully modern API. If you like what Vite has given you, well, Evan is the same guy behind it. So trust me, Vue 3 is a dream to work with over React. No fully stable release for 2 years? Come on!

react ecosystem became too cluttered now that there is now thousand ways to do the same dam thing

react is trying to do many things at once

There is something to say about accessibility though. Ract with Nextjs is a lot easier to get going than trying to patch together a bunch of different packages around react on its own.

I hate Javascript. Too many framework/library and there is no standard workflow.

In my opinion the way React Server Component and Next.js Server Actions works is even more strange compared to things like Qwik and HTMX.

So... What would be the best path to migrate large scale projects already made in react to one of these frameworks? Or just leave them by their own without new features? Just as it happened with Angular js and Angular 2?

I don't agree with max on the point that it should have one or another feature from a full stack point, I think react is weird because it is becoming obsolete, in terms of performance and dx and it's not evolving, not as a full stack framework but as a UI lib itself, at this point, we should have signals in react and something less error prone than useEffect to control lifecycle

It's not weird. What they are doing is evil but understandable.

How come there is no MVC framework for Node with React?

For me react is the library i mostly hated during my 6 years of software engineering

if they learn react with react router, will face nightmare learning nextjs router later 😂, Now days you need like 2 years of learning to start from 0 and become a react developer

Server Components is not “a feature” of react — it’s an expression “use clients” for runtimes to decide in which context (browser, smartphone, server, terminal) etc they want to run it on. An API extension or plugin interface if you will. It’s like saying json should provide a json server, because they introduced a field to the schema.

I am yet to understand the main advantage of a server component. I dont know of any application that does not need user interactions and you cant do this with server component. You have to make it use client which then is really no different with a reactjs component. This i understand is the main advantage of Next over react. Second, SEO is important mostly for websites not really applications. And even a website needs user interaction (mostly) so it will mostly use client. I jist don't get the hype over server components. Does anyone?

I believe we will return to creating SPAs again.. I often wonder why many software companies choose to create their own front pages instead of using platforms like Wix, Squarespace, or Hubspot, which offer all the necessary things. Of course, there are instances where custom solutions are needed, particularly for good SEO. However, the current widespread use of next.js seems to be more about popularity than necessity.

I don't think react changed, it just provides interfaces and let's others extend the featureset based on that. What has changed is that these metaframeworks take care of a lot of things that are mandatory for state of the art application development anyways (people new to programming are just unaware of it). Whoever chooses not to use those can still pick and choose third party libraries as he used to, although it makes little sense. If I don't like nextjs I choose something else e.g. sveltekit or qwik city.
Regarding the learning I agree that you should get your hands dirty with the individual pieces before going to application development but that holds true for any library or framework you use in your codebase. People just need to put in the work/hours to gain experience and stop crying. I often setup small code examples or side projects as PoCs.

Web Designer with a lot of coding experience. Looking to learn React due to the salary potential. Do I sharpen the design skills or do I take a deeper dive in React?

React is dead. Node is dead. Bun and HTMX is the future.

one line summary: framework dependency rather than a standalone library

React is like Wordpress of javascript, everybody uses it, but it's one of the worst options.

React has always been weird, there are so many better alternatives.