> I have literally never heard an argument made for react that included merits of the framework itself.

That doesn't mean that those merits don't exist. Most of the new React competitors are just reinventions of HTML templating done client-side. React has been dominant for so long that there's a whole generation of frontend devs who don't remember why it was invented in the first place. Writing loops in HTML? We tried that, it sucks!

It's telling that the "new" frameworks have no ideas other than to revert to ideas that were tried in the past. React is so modern it makes its replacements feel dated.

> I have been a part of quite a few tech stack decisions at various companies and startups. I have literally never heard an argument made for react that included merits of the framework itself. The decision was always based on a combination for familiarity, ability to hire for eng roles, and the ecosystem.

Couple of thoughts regarding this:

* A competing alternative would have to have really big benefits from a technical standpoint to outweigh the React advantages that you mentioned.

* When exploring alternatives IMO the burden of proving that something is better lies within the person/people that want to go with an alternative option. React is the de facto standard these days so it shouldn't be a matter of "why React" but "why not React".

Then why dont you pick jquery?

Its easy and well known, even now.

The answer I see is that react is technically good enough.

Using boring technology doesnt mean using the technically most advanced thing.

It means picking something safe and stable.

Im not sure how this is a negative merit for React.

Besides if you are a small company, or a start up, your job is to get things done. Not to embark on a global technology crusade to push your favourite tech.

By and large the best thing about react is the overall ecosystem, libraries, talent and ubiquitousness. And thats a good thing.

Pretty much every social group falls prey to these biases. It has no correlation to the education or intelligence level of the group. When there is a well known saying "science progresses one funeral at a time" you know it is unavoidable.

> "we can hire more easily".

Is this the synonym for cheaper workforce? You always get decent people if you pay enough.

I think (at least part of) the reason why React has been so successful is that is scales so well: it's actually a relatively simple tool that works well for small problems. Pair it with a Vite template or something and you can be up-and-running in minutes. But it continues working pretty well as your app gets bigger, too.

But where React fails is actually in more complex scenarios. Prop drilling becomes tedious or intractable, so now we have all these different ways to manage state (Context, Redux, MobX, Recoil, Zustand, Jotai...). Your re-rendering gets slow, so now you need to start sprinkling React.memo() all over the place and adding reselect (or re-reselect!) queries and restructuring or denormalizing your store data, but then it turns out some of your props are objects that are regenerating each render cycle, so you need to memoize those too, and you end up on a wild goose chase there. Or your engineers were sloppy and accidentally put some side-effects into your components, so you've got subtle bugs you're not sure how to fix. And there's a lot of complexity or even unanswered questions around things like robustly fetching data your component needs, and maybe React Router answers them but then you end up down a whole other rabbit hole, especially when a new version of React Router comes out and breaks everything.

And the moment you need to increase complexity in your app, you need to add back react.

>"React is great at solving complex problems."

The only thing it is great for is creating complex problems out of simple things.

React is totally fine for solving simple problems.

I'd classify pretty much all frontend web development I do as simple. It's pretty much just boring internal websites, I definitely don't need react for them. Could have made the same thing with any other frontend framework, could have made it server-side rendered. React is totally fine for that. The backend is generally more exciting than the frontend. React is totally fine.

The main problem I see is that most other developers are really ass at their jobs and just overcomplicate everything. I've seen very simple apps have a super complex React codebase, and due to the complexity they're always full of bugs. It's much more rare that I see an elegantly simple React app, or any other app for that matter. Everyone just always overcomplicates everything.

Using React doesn't in any way require you to make it complex. You can make React apps dead simple. And if you are comfortable working with react you'll already know all the solutions to all the problems which makes your job extremely easy. You can breeze through and make the entire simple app in a few days if you know what you're doing. Or you can pick up some new fancy tool, hey let's try Svelte. And now instead of a few days we're gonna spend a few weeks and end up with a codebase that reflects our Svelte experience. And hey look it's time to onboard a new team member - hey guy, we have these three apps - this one's made with Angular because one dimwit wanted to learn that, here's a Svelte app we made last year and lastly here's a HTMX app we made when that was hot. Good luck learning 3 new technologies you'll probably never use again!