So basically react class components? It definitely was not easier in those days.

When your just using vanilla react, I've never had a problem with hooks being that hard to reason about. Once you add in SSR, routers, query caching frameworks, etc the "lifecycle & state" starts to get confusing.

This is mostly a problem with the additional complexity of these frameworks (nextjs, tanstack) and not react at its core. Building an app with just react (and maybe redux) feels so simple and natural once you learn the paradigm.

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the_gipsy 3 hours ago | parent [-]

But you cannot really develop anything meaningful without adding frameworks.

I guess redux solves both "state" and "messages" at once, that's good. But what you work with then is not "vanilla react" at all. I don't even think "vanilla react" can really exist, beyond toy examples. You either use frameworks or write them yourself (worse).

	▲	cjonas 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> But you cannot really develop anything meaningful without adding frameworks. You can develop extremely powerful web-apps using just React + Redux. Once you need to start dealing with SSR for SEO & server side caching, data preloading, hydration, etc... things get complex. But honestly that's because those concepts are inherently complex and that complexity can only be reduced so far. Another problem is they get baked into these framework as the "default" and often over utilized when they aren't actually needed.