This. React was incredibly innovative at a time where the alternatives were some combination of:

* Two-way data binding spaghetti

* Boilerplate-heavy reactivity

* Opaque, framework-specific magic

* Manual state updates/transitions

React didn't win "by default" (whatever that means), it won because it was better than most of the other options at the time.

I agree that, on purely technical grounds, it isn't as strong of a framework as other competitors anymore, but React is and has always been Good Enough™ for most companies, to the point that it's not worth reaching for anything else most of the time. And I say this as someone who doesn't like most things about modern React.

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andy_ppp 21 hours ago | parent [-]

[flagged]

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RussianCow 21 hours ago | parent | next [-]

React was actually pretty simple in the early days. It's gotten significantly more complex because of hooks, suspense, SSR, and other features they've introduced more recently. But I would still take modern React over AngularJS 1 and I think it's far more explicit.

	▲	rimunroe 21 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The source code for hooks when they were initially released was actually really straightforward too. It's been many years since I've read through other parts of the source code though.

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AstroBen 21 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Yeah, that's where the complexity is supposed to be

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johnfn 21 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

All framework code has magic in it. But I posit that React uses magic internally so that we can write magic-free code. It's like how the Rust compiler contains unsafe code.