Exploring how React’s dominance by default stifles frontend innovation, and why deliberate framework choices lead to better tools for performance, developer experience, and ecosystem diversity.
Read in full here:
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Is it true that React caused the DDoS at Cloudflare?
Dang, this was one beautiful article. Author didn’t mince words at all. Hopefully many people get to read this article and re-think everything around frontend development and the tech industry in general.
Thanks to his article, I’ll be looking at these other frameworks: Svelte, Solid and Qwik.
There are quite a few stingers in there:
We’ve centered mental models around “React patterns” instead of web fundamentals, reducing portability of skills and making architectural inertia more likely.
React’s dominance creates self-reinforcing barriers. Job postings ask for “React developers” rather than “frontend engineers,” limiting skill diversity. Component libraries and team muscle memory create institutional inertia.
Monoculture slows web evolution when one framework’s constraints become de facto limits. Talent spends cycles solving framework-specific issues rather than pushing the platform forward. Investment follows incumbents regardless of technical merit.
Curricula optimize for immediate employability over fundamentals, creating framework-specific rather than transferable skills. Platform improvements get delayed because “React can handle it” becomes a default answer.
The entire ecosystem suffers when diversity disappears.
A lot of arguments in here can be equally applied to how we feel about Elixir’s adoption on the backend as well. The same hiring, technical arguments are front and center. Just to digress a little.
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I am not an expert myself, but I agree that a lot of devs don’t understand web fundamentals, even though they can code well in React.