That's only the rendering, though. If you used other libraries (that's already included in angular) you wouldn't be able to say the same. For instance if you use routing in react, you've probably have had to rewrite your app 6 times by now.
Angular has been pretty stable since the v4 release. I recently did an upgrade of a large enterprise app from v8 tot v15... Jumping 7 major releases, no problem with the migration tool.
They’re different things, though. React has a lot less going on. If you want something with a stable API for the tasks React is suited to, it doesn’t make sense to throw Angular at that job.
I don't think that's quite true anymore. As someone sarcastically remarked on Twitter [0], React has patched native events with synthetic events; has rolled out its own scheduler in order to achieve the suspense effect ("patched the event loop"), and is going to patch the native fetch for reasons that I am not clear about, but that are doubtless also suspense-related. With hooks, it introduced a syntax with a set of implicit conventions that, confusingly, still looks like javascript, but has significant differences from how javascript works ("the rules of hooks"). React provides its own way of lazy-loading modules; its new server-side renderer currently assumes that when React rehydrates, it takes control of the whole DOM tree; and the docs are now strongly recommending people to use full-fledged frameworks (Next, Remix) when starting new projects. React has long outgrown its "it's just a library" stage, sadly.
Yeah, the most WTF thing I've seen React do is to mess with console.log by silencing them (WTF #1), which was particularly appalling since React did it only because it run the rendering twice under StrictMode (WTF #2), and only during development so you're not sure what the real behavior will be until you run it on production mode (WTF #3).
Messing with the console is such a no-go that I'm appalled it even passed the drawing board, making the "React isn't a framework, it's a library" argument even more bonkers than it already is.
Oh, I totally forgot how mad I am at React because, with the new hooks-based approach, it has removed the semantic of "do this side effect just once when a component mounts". Mounting a component is such a crucial part of the life cycle of any web component that I am amazed that the React team does not have a special way of handling this; or that with their new architecture they are not guaranteeing how many mount-unmount cycles a component will go through.
This all makes me want to move on to web components; but of course now the project that I am a developer on is locked in React :-(
Certainly, I don't think React is a trivial library. It's an absolute beast given its narrow scope of application. I suppose my point was that React's narrower scope means it's easier to keep a stable API compared to Angular which has a much broader scope. But maybe you weren't suggesting that's incorrect, and just wanted to point out that React is a rat's nest now (which is totally fair, haha).
