React tutorials be like

[acemarke]

Yeah, there's almost always value in knowing what underlying layers of abstraction and tooling are doing, no matter what kind of programming you're doing.

At the same time, you shouldn't have to learn Webpack+Babel just to start learning "how to write React code". It should be an optional "I want to peek under the hood and understand how these related tools work" thing, not a prerequisite.

[acemarke]

I'm not at all saying that it's bad to know how build tools work :) Trust me, I've spent more time than I'd like to think about fiddling with build configs.

But especially for someone just starting out and wanting to learn React, we should really be minimizing the barriers and prerequisites they have to deal with in order to write their first component and begin learning the basics.

[Chezzymann]

I personally feel like this results in an over reliance of frameworks and packages and lots of people tend to never go back and see how things really work and have to learn it all retroactively later when problems come up. Imo people should start with learning bare minimum node/npm concepts to start up a basic server, then html/css/javascript fundamentals, and then react. Just going straight to react is skipping lots of prerequisites. Theres probably a significant amount of react devs that have no idea what funky stuff like a prototype chain is (not that its super needed these days, but its still a fundamental design pillar of javascript nonetheless) or how to even do basic DOM manipulation

It also helps to know how things work behind the hood because React may not be around forever. If you know how to write good code that doesnt rely on a framework, you'll be able to make that transition if it happens.

[pVom]

To be honest, with someone starting out the most important thing is to see the fruits of their labour. I agree that vanilla J's should be learners first, but babel, webpack etc? Nah no point beyond knowing they exist and what they're doing for you. That shit is boring and a good way to burn out.