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This has to be one of the strangest conspiracy theories I've ever heard. If other shops felt the same way you did about React - that it was an evil master plot by Facebook to sap all of our productivity and competitiveness - they just wouldn't use it. There's plenty of other options.

The fact that it continues to enjoy high popularity despite being designed, as you seem to think, as a tech debt Trojan horse.... maybe you have to consider all those other companies out there know something about the folly of developing apps with "vanilla HTML/CSS/JS" that you don't.




That's not really what I was trying to say. I think it's perfectly well designed to suit Facebook's internal needs. And it's also guaranteed to drain resources from startup developers. Intent is not necessary, it's just what happened.

> If other shops felt the same way you did about React [...] about the folly of developing apps with "vanilla HTML/CSS/JS" that you don't

I'm fairly confident that almost nobody shares this opinion, so personal attacks on my competency are expected, yes. The problem with all tech fads is that support for them is absolutely ardent, until the pendulum swings in the other direction.

It was unwise to post an unpopular opinion and I accept people's judgement that it was a net detriment to the discussion. But I posted it and now it's out there. If it's any consolation, I wouldn't do it again.


It's amazing how much productivity is draining out of my team when we are waiting fractions of a second for a component to hot reload. I want to go back to vanilla full page re-renders immediately /s


This "conspiracy theory" has been around for long enough, and was discussed by Joel in 2002 in his "Fire and Motion"'article:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000339.html

The idea that big companies keep throwing out new technologies to keep little companies churning, even if it didn't exist when Joel wrote about it, could have been adopted after. Of course, some of his calls were wrong in that article, but that's a different discussion.




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