I feel this with every fiber of my being. I used to do a TON of front-end work, some of it quite cutting edge, delivering highly performant user experiences in the browser that had previously been only thought possible in a native app. Back in like 2009-2015. I was deeply connected with the web standards fundamentals and how to leverage them mostly directly.

I detoured into heavier focus on backend work for quite a while, concurrent with the rise of React, and watched its rise with suspicion because it seemed like such an inefficient way to do things. That, and JSX's limitations around everything having to be an expression made me want to gauge out my eyes.

Still, React pushed and laid the foundation for some really important paradigm shifts in terms of state management. The path from the old mental models around state to a unidirectional flow of immutable data... re-learning a totally new mental model was painful, but important.

Even though it's been chaotic at times, React has delivered a lot of value in terms of innovation and how we conceptualize web application architecture.

But today, when you compare it to something like SolidJS, it's really clear to see how Solid delivers basically all the same benefits, but in an architecture that's both simpler and more performant. And in a way that's much easier to organize and reason about than React. You still get JSX, server components, reactive state management (actually a MUCH better and cleaner foundation for that) and any React dev could move to Solid with fairly little mental re-wiring of the neural pathways. It doesn't require you to really change anything about how you think about application architecture and structure. It just basically does everything React does but better, faster, and with drastically smaller bundle sizes.

Yet I still have to begrudgingly use React in several contexts because of the industry-wide inertia, and I really wish I didn't have to.

> It just basically does everything React does but better

SolidJS still has some major pain points; the one I found was not knowing whether a prop was a signal or needed to become one. The type system doesn't help much. In React, you know for sure that if your reference changes, the component reading that reference as a prop will re-render. In Solid, it's less clear whether the update will be observed.

> Yet I still have to begrudgingly use React in several contexts because of the industry-wide inertia, and I really wish I didn't have to.

I think you'll find a lot of people begrudgingly have to work and really wish they didn't have to. That means using what they know, which means React. Which I totally get. People want to spend time with their kids, hobbies etc. Worst case, they might be caring for others, like their elderly parents.

You don’t have to! I wonder what you think of this framework my company (mostly me) developed over the last decade, I am open sourcing it under MIT license: https://github.com/Qbix/Q.js

>You still get JSX

Give me S-expressions instead. How else am I supposed to prove to frontend developers that I didn't make those up