Comment by ediatedia
7 hours ago
Ok, I'll bite. I've been coding for almost 25 years so have seen various things come and go, so hopefully have a bit of capital in the bank.
Don't get me wrong, a HTML5 radio button is a beautiful thing, and sometimes React is a hammer and everything is a nail.
However, I think something that OP doesn't mention super explicitly in their post is the codebase they are working on is probably a React codebase. React is a great abstraction for building UIs. I've built a ton of them and the complexity only needs to go above a certain degree until you need a way more descriptive way of explaining your UI based upon other state, instead of trying to wire a load of DOM elements together.
If you are already using the React ecosystem, for things like form validation (again, possible with HTML5 but as soon as the complexity cranks or you can't use the server - you probably need a library), then using something like Radix is a great choice, OP even mentions how although it's not technically a visible radio button that is shipped to the DOM, it acts like one for a11y reasons, and this is due in part because it's very, very easy to write inaccessible HTML. And ShadCN is pre-made components on top of that, and they all work pretty well together.
Nothing is perfect, but even in my "old man yells at cloud" era, I personally don't think this one is worth yelling at the cloud for.
As someone who has never really dived into React etc., my main question is "where is the line?"
I'm sure you'll agree that React is overkill for some applications and, for the sake of this discussion, I'll agree that it's beneficial for applications beyond a certain complexity.
But where exactly (or even, roughly) does that line lie? A basic CRUD app? Surely not. A calculator? I'm guessing "no". Bluesky? Maybe/probably.
2 pieces of UI in different parts of the page that depend on the same data - that's the line (also matches the initial goal of React - sync FB chat widgets).
Bluesky absolutely yes, something like React makes sense.
I think it depends on a few things but the two big ones in my mind are:
1) Interactivity. How rich do you need/want the interactivity to be? As this scales up the benefit of React also increases.
Of course you can get highly interactive vanilla HTML sites but it’s much easier to achieve with React.
2) Statefulness. The more UI state you have the more a tool like React helps you. Again, it’s not doing anything you cannot do with vanilla HTML/JS but the level of difficulty comparatively is night and day.
On top of that, React is widely adopted. The tooling is fantastic, the community is strong, the job prospects are very good, and if you’re hiring the talent pool for React is vast.