Comment by ianmarcinkowski

My journey. Raw PHP + SQL Queries -> Python + server-side rendered HTML -> Ruby/Python APIs + ugly JS frontends -> Python + EmberJS (remember that?!) -> Go/Ruby/Python/I don't care anymore + React.

My problems with React are more about JS/TS and how other devs (it's never me! I swear!) can write terrible code that passes tests and isn't readable or maintainable. The JS Tradeoff is that we can handle rapidly evolving web landscape, but we have to deal with NPM and supply-chain hacks periodically. shrug

I am fine with the complexities of events, hooks and re-renders in React because we want to build interactive programs and nothing comes for free. Data fetching libraries like Tanstack Query solve one of the hardest problems of cache invalidation/re-rendering.

React was the thing that made me actually enjoy making interfaces for users. I just want to build stuff.

I experiment a bit with HTMX for my super simple single-page tools with some basic javascript, Next.js is nice but kind of thirsty to get you to use Vercel, I like Flask-Admin for really simple tools that must render a page from a server-hosted application.