I feel like it’s a historical accident. In the past the platform couldn’t do it all, and if you wanted a dialog you had to use a library. Developers were trained to reach for libraries when they needed something like a dialog.

Then react came along and all developed learning web development after react had little to no knowledge of the platform. They were taught that touching the DOM was a bad thing to do.

That’s about it. Even now when I advocate for vanilla css I get the side eye and “tailwind and shadcn should be the default”. I get it, it’s what most people are familiar with, even if it’s worse than the platform.

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corgi192 3 hours ago | parent [-]

How is tailwind and shadcn worse than platform? It speeds up development by orders of magnitude.

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WuxiFingerHold 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Depends on the criteria, e.g. if dev speed has highest prio, a full blown component lib like Material UI would be superior to shadcn. CSS can obviously do things that tailwind can't, so it is more powerful.

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tancop an hour ago | parent [-]

The point of shadcn is you can pull in a component and modify it any way you want. It's always going to be bare bones at the start. Something like MUI locks you into a layout and style that's coupled with the API, and you need to rewrite big chunks of your app if you want to add your own branding.

For me the best middle ground is Headless UI or Bits for Svelte, unstyled and composable but you don't need to vendor code into your repo like shadcn.

	▲	WuxiFingerHold an hour ago \| parent [-]
		You are not wrong, but not to my point.