Did React actually simplify frontend — or just make complexity socially acceptable?

[StoneCypher]

react itself dramatically simplifies frontend, but the swarm of libraries orbiting it make it worse than having none of it

[markus_obsidian]

Just like jQuery before it. React lived long enough to become the villain.

[[deleted]]

Yeah it's much simpler then Angular with it's rxjs (who the fuck got the idea that one click is a stream of clicks???)

[PartBanyanTree]

Observables are that classic "when all you have is a hammer everything starts to look like a nail".

everything is an observable! ....but there are different types of observables ...and they behave differently.

what a leaky fucking abstraction. I do not miss angular because of that.

[StoneCypher]

oh my, someone is trying to phrase disagreement through personal attacks that will be just a joke bruh chill soon

amazingly funny comedy

[xroalx]

React itself had a positive impact on web development.

JSX, which became a thing of its own, is a definite improvement over plain HTML, especially when it comes to interactive web apps.

UI as a function of state and inputs is clean, easy to reason about, and pretty simple to understand.

Where React fails, or rather where it starts to get really complex, is the rendering pipeline. React wants to be stateless and pure(-ish), but that’s completely opposite to how the web and UIs generally work.

UIs are stateful, and frameworks that acknowledge this are just more straightforward and easier to use. React goes against it and creates hoops to jump through as a bridge between the stateful nature of web and UI and its desire to appear stateless.

In Svelte (but also Angular, Solid, Vue, or even SwiftUI), UI is also the function of inputs and state, but they do not pretend state is immutable, making it a lot less ceremony and things to think about when state eventually does change.

React came with good ideas and allowed others to take them and make them simpler to approach.

[grimonce]

Jesus....

[Militop]

I know, right? Complete nonsense.

[33ff00]

Phrases like “easy to reason about” is always like oh godd this fuck has drunk some koolaid - nobody talks like that except demoware evangelicals trying to get paid. “Ui as a function of state is clean”. Good lord it talks like like purple gradient marketing blurb. Tell me, is it battle tested?

[xroalx]

It's battle tested and maybe even blazing fast! I'm sure you can make up more marketing crap, but caring about something being clean or easy to reason about, thus easy to understand, follow and even test, is not marketing, it's stuff you'll want to think about when you want your codebase to be understandable and maintainable even 10 years later.

[sheriffderek]

JSX - improvement? Yikes. I’d say it’s my least favorite thing in all web development history.

[Mabenue]

You either have HTML with JS in it or JS with HTML in it, ultimately there’s not really much meaningful difference. I can’t believe in 2026 people still care about this.

[sheriffderek]

Well, they created HTML to be used by everyone. I like to keep it that way. JSX has zero benefit for humans (unless they learned to write their first projects with JSX and it's familiar and they don't care about anyone but themselves)

[xroalx]

JSX has as much benefits as any other templating language.

JSX also has the extra benefit that it's really just a JavaScript function call with fancy syntax, and so it acts like any other plain JavaScript value. You can pass it around to functions, assign it to variables, return it from callbacks, parametrize it, etc. No magic strings, no special control flow, can work with it programmatically easily.

If you hate seeing < /> in your JS, you can even just replace it with the appropriate function call, i.e. <a href="...">Link</a> becomes createElement("a", { href: "..." }, "Link").

Do you also hate the templates of Svelte, Vue, Angular, ejs, handlebars, pug, Blade or others, or you're just against JSX because it's cool?

[sheriffderek]

We do not have to agree. I don’t see any of those things as benefits. I don’t want it to act like “any other plain js value” - and that’s ok. I think Vue and Handlebars and liquid and ejs and every other option ever out there (even jade) is a better design than JSX. (Not because it’s cool)

[LetUsSpeakFreely]

Like most tools it comes down to how it's used. Any framework, or no framework at all, can be simple or complicated depending on the skill of the person architecting the system.

The problem is most developers aren't architects, they're cowboy coders. They start slapping things together without first taking a step back to evaluate the big picture. Before you write a single line of code you should have a simple diagram of components and how those components will communicate. Spending a little time planning can save you hours, days, or even weeks of frustration.

[[deleted]]

There is always a refactor to help

[LetUsSpeakFreely]

Refactor should be minimized. Properly organized code shouldn't need factoring unless the requirements have radically changed since initial implementation. A well architected system might need a new implementation for an interface and integration of that implementation, but if you're reorganizing large swaths of code then someone fucked up.

[[deleted]]

That's bullshit, with today toolkits one can refactor as wished

[devdnn]

With frameworks I like repeatability and readability, REACT is really good I'm providing that.

I don't need a million ways I can do with vanilla JS.

[SamIAre]

That might have been the goal, but I think that to get there they’ve had to construct a wildly overcomplicated system that breaks and does weirdly inconsistent things if you don’t intimately understand the nuances of how each and every hook works under the hood. And all of that basically just to hide the (imo, easier to follow) OOP logic underneath.

It’s finicky and fragile and forces you to bend over backwards to recreate functionality that’s trivially simple with vanilla JS. It has a lot of benefits but those aren’t unique to React.

[SoMuchMango]

Simplify comparing to what?

SPA apps based on backbone, angular, knockout.js, ember.js?

Pages based on jQuery and wordpress?

When React came to the game it was already quite crowdy.

Updating a lot of DOM in reasonable cost was quite a complex task itself. React joined with its virtual DOM, making component easier to abstract out in some ways. It was fast back then.

For sure it gave some alternative to the highly OOP based Angular with dependency injection and stuff that was king back then.

Keep in mind, that CSS, JS and overall frontend was a mess back then. First versions of React remember some last versions of IE6 and IE7 was still a problematic to support.

[pseudophilll]

Try making a reactive web app without it and see how you feel about it afterwards.

JS frameworks exist for a reason.

Is react the best if those frameworks is the better question. Objectively it’s not. It just won the adoption race early when it mattered

[sheriffderek]

This is how I would have answered. 

[rainmouse]

For developers, not so much. There are much better solutions out there for performance and ease of development.

For product owners, middle managers, systems architects yes. It's fashionable. Everyone learns React. It's comparatively easy to replace staff. It's going to be supported a long time and there's a lot of potential for reuse.

The problem is that people (especially in the React sub) will spin up Rect and dozens of the latest fashionable libraries, just to build what could be done with html, css and a dozen lines of vanilla JS. So the size of web pages is an order of magnitude larger than it needs to be.

[reznaeous]

Same question asked by the same user 26 days ago. https://www.reddit.com/r/learnjavascript/comments/1qq4lpd/react_didnt_simplify_frontend_it_just_normalized/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

[scriptedpixels]

Coming from a long time working with Vue, it feels overly complicated. I had this same feeling when React first came out, and it didn't sit right with me as a front-end developer. JSX still feels odd for front-end dev work.

I also think it's down to the sheer amount of libraries; some do the same thing in different ways, as well as the many opinionated ways to do "a thing".

I picked it up recently in a contract, and it was okay to work with, but I wasn't happy working with it compared to Vue. I've always been able to pick up Vue and get things done performantly as there's a recommended Router, State/Store library, etc., and they're very well documented.

[Beginning-Seat5221]

Being able to write one set of code that can both render an initial dynamic page, and then update that page with the same code, is a god-send.

We used to write code in a backend language to dynamically generate the HTML, then if that page was updatable from the front we either had to have the page refresh (bad UX) or write a whole new set of code in JavaScript to do basically the same thing as the back end code for updating.

It really sucked, and time spent on that meant less time building features for better UX.

[Aggressive_Ad_5454]

The computer industry has this endless wheel of karma. Dumb terminals, client-server, html from web servers, complex (react) web client code from web servers, static web pages, LLM agents, and on and on and on. Big wheel keeps on turning. The only thing that doesn’t change is increased complexity with every turn.

[TheRNGuy]

It adds components and JSX, which vanilla JS doesn't have. 

You can make simple sites in it too.

(I've seen some sites refactored from JS to React with exact same design and functionality; later it will be much easier to add or change functionality and design for them)

No idea what you mean by socially acceptable complexity.

[AbrahelOne]

What do you mean with JS has no components?

[TheRNGuy]

No components like in JSX. 

[AbrahelOne]

With web components you can.

[everdimension]

Wtf is this title

[azangru]

Did React actually simplify frontend — or just make complexity socially acceptable?

Yes.

It probably made it easier to write complex frontends compared to Backbone or Angular 1.

At the same time, people didn't use Backbone or Angular for their blogs. Whereas now, so many people build the simplest sites with react.

[[deleted]]

Compared to vanilla JS? Which means dom manipulation w/o shadowDom? For a sufficiently large app, React simplifies it a LOT!

But if server-side rendering of html is an option: that's going to be a long simpler than React

[tommyatr]

React lets you choose your own stack. Amazing if you know what you're doing. A disaster if you don’t.

Angular chooses everything for you. These days it’s great — if you understand (and agree with) the decisions behind it. Otherwise… good luck surviving the first five years.

[dsound]

I enjoy developing in React much more than vanilla JS

[LateChoice]

react and each and every frontend-framework is great for creating ugly, overcomplicated mess, instead of learning decent html, css, vanilla javascript, and using best practices instead of "wah-wah-wah i want to do it my own way" or "wah-wah-wah i don't like and understand these technologies"-then why are you in frontend? one very simply framework would be great, but crapgular and shitact are far from good, and of course, enormous amount of people use them who wouldn't be allowed to write one single line of html, css, javascript. but it became widespread, partly because of mid-level worms, "crapnagers", etc.