I was never a big React fan myself. As someone who has used a lot of different JavaScript frameworks over many years, I can say confidently that it's not the best JS framework; especially nowadays due to bloat.

Yet it's better than anything available in any other programming language, on any other platform in existence.

Never bet against JavaScript. People have done this over and over and over again since it was invented. So many haters. It's like every junior dev was born a JavaScript hater and spends most of their career slowly working themselves to a state of 'tolerating JavaScript'.

JS was designed to be future-proof and it kept improving over the years; what happened is it improved much faster than people were able to adjust their emotions about it... These people even preached the JS hate to a whole generation of juniors; some of whom never even experienced JavaScript first-hand. It's been cool to hate JavaScript since I can remember.

JavaScript does have some bad parts, as does any other programming language, but the good parts of JS are better than anything else in existence. People keep trying to build abstractions on top (e.g. TypeScript) to try to distance people from JavaScript, but they keep coming back over and over again... And these people will never admit to themselves that maybe the reason they keep coming back to JavaScript is because it's pretty darn great. Not perfect, but great nonetheless.

It's hilarious that now we have Web Assembly; meaning you can compile any language to run in the browser... But almost nobody is doing that. Do people realize how much work was required to bring Web Assembly to the browser? Everyone knows it exists, it's there for you to use, but nobody is using it! What does that say? Oh, it's because of the bundle size? Common! Look at React, React bundles are so bloated! But they are heavily used! The excuse that JavaScript's success is a result of its browser monopoly is gone!

Enough is enough! The fact is; you probably love JavaScript but you're just too weak to admit it! I think the problem is that non-JS developers have got a big mouth and small hands...

> but the good parts of JS are better than anything else in existence

What you talking about?! I can't think of a single thing in Js that I could say is good.

Okay, two big corporations have invested a lot of money and effort into making V8 and TypeScript, and now it's useful. But I don't consider it exactly part of Js.

You lost me at Typescript. Typescript is great not because it abstracts away any javascript functionality (it doesn't), but because it allows IDE integrations (mainly LSP) to better understand your code, enabling go-to-definition, hover docs, autocomplete, semantic highlighting, code actions, inline error messages, etc.

But I agree many people are jumping on the javascript hate train without really understanding the modern web landscape.

Do people really hate JavaScript, or do they just hate the design choices and results that it seems to be correlated with?

At the end of the day I’m using SaaS tools that are apparently written in React and I get astounded but how slow and heavy they are. If you are editing a page on our companies cloud-based wiki, I’ve seen my chrome RAM balloon from 3GB to 16G. A mistake was made somewhere, that I know.