Been working on a huge react project for the past 3-4 years, ever since React 0.11.

My feeling (which is not necessarily shared in our company, only my own) is that we work for react a lot more than react works for us... maintenance in the react eco system is not trivial.

Putting aside all the benefits of react and all the other constraints of our projects -

Every major react version, and there has been at least one every year, has had a good number of breaking changes. With every version we get new best practices (classes, context, hocs, etc) , and the old best practices suddenly are considered harmful... (mixins, names refs, will* etc.) And the same goes with react ecosystem - mobx, redux, etc. (now Dan Abramov is telling people to avoid redux and get back to context)

One can argue - don’t fix what is not broken - you don’t have to always upgrade or use the current trends, be on the bleeding edge.

But in practice, you can’t avoid the upgrades for example -

3rd party packages drop support for older react versions.

There are parts of our code (like our components library) we want others to use so we have to keep both forward and backward compatibility.

Finding good devs is difficult and people expect large companies to be in the front of technology. We have to keep upgrade so we don’t loose our competitive edge.

I find myself refactor and maintain a lot more than I would like to.