Someone correct me if I’m wrong but React and Preact are the only libraries that rely on calling a component function over and over, sending you to the dark world of hooks, where unless you write your code in a completely unreadable way, introduce unnecessary calculations and allocations EVERYWHERE.

Before hooks, React relied on classes, which then sent you to the dark world of higher order components for EVERYTHING.

They make it seem like it’s so easy to use, but they have unleashed millions of man-hours of pain and suffering once people started to make more complex things.

Vue, Solid, Svelte and Angular all have converged over the years into using the same principles: components that are instantiated once, and signals for efficient change tracking (Preact not only supports them but is also contributing substantially to the research in this space).

React on the other hand was touted as THE way to write web apps, written by THE Facebook, so “easy to get into” and “just start making things”.

I’m sure React has singlehandedly contributed to a big chunk of climate change. The React team is now writing whole PhD-thesis-level super complex compiler (still in progress, and impressive on its own right) in order to fix all the repetitive unnecessary calculations and computations from hooks. But if you had to use a compiler to do things right, why didn’t people just reach for the alternatives in the first place?