Comment by adithyassekhar
5 hours ago
The biggest mistake I did in 2025 was picking shadcn because it was so hyped. Saw it importing from radix anytime you enter a command. First red flag. Then I saw the radio component. Second red flag. You should see what they've done with the select component. But we were too far into the deadline for a project with running targets. So I just gave up and asked copilot to make the changes for me, and I'm not a fan of AI anything.
Funny enough we did a POC for the same project before that without shadcn and looking back, it's so much leaner and easier.
I might just break one night and redo the whole ui library with vanilla html elements.
They hype-train on all of this stuff is unreal. React+NextJS+Tailwind+ShadCN is just a mess. It's complexity piled on deeper complexity - for little gain! But suggest any of that in many circles and you'll get the standard, "skill issu bro" comebacks. Say what you want about Remix/ReactRouter 7 (there are plenty of issues to talk about there) but at least those guys _tried_ to stay closer to existing web standards. I could go on and on about the disaster of NextJS caching. I could point out RSCs being one way to solve a problem that could already be solved by loaders in other frameworks....
Tailwind was my moment of saying, "Nope, I'm gonna sit this one out". I have a few trusted friends that assure me I'm missing out. I've told them to come back to me after they've done their first major refactor. If they tell me it was a pleasant experience, I'll have another look.
In general, Tailwind and React don't match well. Why use a soup of CSS classes when React has props? If someone needs an a11y-focused base for their component library, they can start with Radix UI directly, ignoring Tailwind and Shadcn.