Whenever someone presents an anecdote like this, there is always someone who says “but then you are doing react wrong”.

Ok, so why is it possible to do it so wrong so often then? That sounds like a downside of the tool. It is a sharp knife. That doesn’t mean there is no place for react, but it also doesn’t mean we have to wipe it under the rug and pretend like it is everybody else’s fault.

I never read a story about it taking an hour to add a field to a form in Rails and it only taking 2 minutes in react. I’ve experienced the other way around for years though. So there is some truth to it. Let’s embrace the truth and look for what react brings us despite this.

> “but then you are doing react wrong”

My objection is not that they are doing React wrong, it’s that their complaint is incoherent because there is literally nothing about React that could make this task take an hour. React isn’t a form library. You write the markup for an html input element, if it’s a controlled input you have a trivial one-line change event handler, and you have a submit event handler. Any additional complexity here isn’t coming from React, and managing to overcomplicate such a basic thing and misidentify the source of the complexity absolutely speaks to a skill issue.

This is especially funny in a thread where posters hold up Rails as a paragon of quality and efficiency.