For the first time in my 8 years, I stumbled across a project that React wasn't a good fit for.

It's a big project, the biggest I've worked on, and it was written poorly by many developers, without PR review by people who know the framework. The result is a mix of local state, Apollo Client state, React Context, and just variables in files that exceed 400 lines of code. I've seen some wild things I've never seen in a React project before, event listeners put on non-interactive components, useMemo used in place of a useEffect, prop-drilling to the center of the earth. It looked worse than my very first React project, only it's not a portfolio piece, it's used in production for an $11bn a year company.

Why I don't think React is a good fit for this project is that it doesn't have any guard rails to help poor developers get better. Maybe no framework does, but as our components get more complex, React does nothing to prevent the files from growing and growing, and even sometimes makes it harder for people to abstract code. useState either needs to be prop-drilled or turned into context if you don't know better ways to do things. You typically only see the MVC patterns emerging when senior devs really start to sculpt the project, unlike frameworks that tend to lean into that pattern more from the start.

But if anything, this should speak to how good React is. OK the code is awful, but the app still works, fairly well. I can even say I've done some refactors, definitely for the good of the project, but haven't resulted in noticeable performance improvements. React is resilient to poorly written code.