Or instead of React you can use native WinUI. So using React is just lazy bloatware introduction

I'm not a dev and actually don't know what React is. I don't care for this metaphor.

As a user, however, I find that the Start menu has become more sluggish than it used to be, and that's pretty annoying. What about that?

Thank you, your comment sure helps to improve our understanding of React a lot.

React is a javascript library. Javascript needs its own runtime. Why not just write stuff in native windows controls and save having to run an entire javascript runtime for no reason?

Its popularity or success in other apps has nothing to with the windows situation.

Other apps are successful despite being slow and bloated, since performance isn’t a primary concern of users. In contrast it’s critical for OS internals like the start menu, so a javascript runtime and framework is just the wrong tool for the job.

"Shit tastes great! Millions of flies can't be wrong!" ;)

React only makes sense as a layer on top of the browser DOM, because the DOM itself cannot be fixed without rewriting it from scratch, so making it usable for non-trivial UI needs to happen in the 'framework layer'.

But without the DOM as the thing that needs fixing and the restrictions of the single-threaded browser-event-loop, the React programming model simply doesn't make a lot of sense. Using the "React-paradigm" outside the browser (e.g. SwiftUI, React Native) is pure cargo-culting, it only makes sense for onboarding web-devs who are already familar with React - but makes it harder to create UIs for anybody else.

The actual problem in the context of Win11 is of course that Microsoft doesn't have any sort of longterm strategy for Windows system APIs (not just UI frameworks). The only long-term-stable API is Win32.

[dead]

No it’s directly putting the blame on developers

Introducing bloat.