Comment by sublimefire

This takes me back close to 15 years ago: using backend session management in Grails and the html forms that were enhanced with “some” JS, using responsive CSS. The difference at that time was browser tech not being as advanced as now, we had to care for different browsers and deal with IE7 and even IE6, it was difficult and we needed extensive QA (Browserstack would appear later). There is a reason why we had JS library evolution. Dude there was no npm, not even bower. Then we had Backbone.js - loved it, then AngularJS - amazing, then Angular version which had huge breaking changes then React, Polymer etc. Native browsers can do a lot these days, it is easy to enhance the functionality as well. But it was not always the same, the decisions to use React made sense for a variety of reasons at the time, maybe it was the case here as well.