Comment by ppqqrr
2 days ago
It's been going downhill for a while, even before AI. The VC-funded React SaaS craze took the "put something barely functional on the web, make some subscription cash" model and scaled it to what is essentially a scam/spam industry.
So if the UX feels increasingly framed in terms of what the "developers" see/want/believe to be profitable, and less from the actual user's perspective, that's because the UX was sketched by hustlers who see software development explicitly as a "React grind to increase MRR/ARR."
I think React is nice if you actually have a state-heavy application (maps, video player, editors,...) to build and the web is OK as a distribution platforms. But most web applications is just data display and form posting. I'm still disappointed with GitHub going full SPA.
what on earth could be state heavy about a video player? timestamps? thumbnails?
I mean, a video player is actually quite stateful. Buffering video data and then decoding delta-changes to get the current image, while adapting to varying connection speeds, external CDNs, and syncing with audio, is a lot! Not counting user interactions like seeking, volume, full-screen, etc. Web browsers have a built-in player that would do a lot of this for you now, but if you were Netflix and wanted a really good player you'd probably customize a lot of this.
Granted, React would not be too helpful with the core video player engine, but actual video apps have lots of other features like comments, preview the next videos, behind-the-scenes notes, etc.
And then, if it's two-way video, you have a whole new level of state to track, and you'd definitely need to roll your own to make a good one.