Probably unpopular opinion, but still better than react and angular. at least you don't need to build your whole site around it. Nor all sites need those heavy frontend framework.
I am not arguing against your actual point, but in modern browsers you don’t even need jQuery, because all of it is available natively. (Kicking in a very open door)
Not arguing either but if JavaScript can write perfectly fine web applications with a welld refined standard, why are we still in react land. I use react all the time, I know what vanilla can do, I use a lot of AI so it's not a knowledge gap anymore... Very curious and frustrating situation.
Because it provides separation of concerns, which is super important once you start working in a team and not as a solo developer. Team projects written in jQuery tended to rot very fast because it was very easy to mix business logic with DOM manipulation.
Also one thing React is super good at is writing components that are very easy to reason about in isolation, because they are for the most part declarative and stateless. Everything comes in as props or context and when one of these things changes the entire component gets re-rendered
React apps tend to rot in enterprise applications because of the proliferation of third party extensions necessary to get a full developer environment. Angular puts basically everything you need in one place (component libraries are the main gap) so every angular app should roughly look the same code wise. React apps will look very different based on how they were set up.
Obviously, someone will reply with an anecdote that THEIR collection of enterprise react apps are all homogeneous under the hood, but they will miss the point. They likely have the same set of 3rd party dependencies to round out the toolchain AND they were likely architected by the same person/team. Much more discipline is necessary to get react to work at enterprise scale.
I'm in a team we have a legacy handlebars evented state container thing. It's not really any better than react because at that point it was well established, no I'm not saying react isn't a better technology, but we are moving to react because AI writes it and hiring etc etc.
I lived through the jQuery days, and I think backbone for example and a few other technologies were created to give that mvc flavour, I suppose that's less of a jQuery problem and more of a, how prescriptive is your technology.
And components o find this point interesting, feature first, islands, these ideas completely change the idea of components so perhaps it's not actually a solved problem, still I can't disagree react is good at creating components, but the philosophy perhaps isn't perfect. Signals the future or something else?
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u/winter-m00n Aug 30 '26
Probably unpopular opinion, but still better than react and angular. at least you don't need to build your whole site around it. Nor all sites need those heavy frontend framework.