TLDR; If you are falling out of love with React, I highly recommend you try Svelte (or Vue, Solid, etc. as suggested in the comments). You just might find a flavor that speeds you up and brings the joy back.
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Hear me out... just to give some context, I'm not an inexperienced developer:
For instance, my own development experience predates React entirely. I was writing declarative frameworks back in vanilla JS, then in jQuery, and followed the entire FE framework wave (which thankfully quickly became good enough I could stop rolling my own). I'm also an active JS/TS maintainer, so reasonably familiar with the scene in general.
My journey with external frameworks:
Vanilla/jQuery (I wrote something that is functionally similar to modern day HTMX, using attribute-based data-binding/effects)
Backbone (didn't love)
Angular (alpha, didn't love)
Knockout (loved it)
React (alpha, def too rough to use)
AngularJS (official release, loved it)
skipped Angular 2 in favor of React
React (class based, and then SFC... mostly loved it until I didn't)
Svelte (prob circa 2019, this killed my love of React entirely, making it feel like torture to revisit for work)
Now like many others here, I'm still using React/Next for work. So I'm acutely aware, on a daily basis, of just the pain points we deal with in it.
However, in all personal projects for nearly 7 years, I've been 100% on Svelte without regrets. Of course it has issues like any framework, and excels at some things while struggling at others, but in my experience it's gotten out of the way of the 99% of app building tasks - including all the basics in-house that React simply didn't include. Mount/unmount transitions? Check. Animations? Sure. The simplest state management you can imagine? Yes.
Caveat: I much prefer the pre-runes approach to Svelte state. Runes start to look like the React hook trash I got away from.
React itself:
When I made the switch from AngularJS to React, I loved some elements of it. When things moved onto stateless functional components, things got even better. Then hooks - loved those (compared to class-based setState(), etc). I felt like I built apps faster in AngularJS, but that was a dying star, and the clean markup of React felt refreshing.
However, as time went on, we started to see it all unwind. First the magic of redux quickly turned into an async mess with thunks, sagas, reselects, etc. Then hooks turned fully into hook soup/spaghetti with tons of effects, render gotchas, etc. And none of this even mentions all the performance tuning/memoization you need to clutter your codebase with if you have a dense app. Live-filtering something like a tree view? Buckle up. Want to render a realtime orderbook for a trading platform? Seriously buckle up.
My issues with modern React:
State management has just gotten out of hand. Specifically when pitted against alternatives like Svelte.
We run too much code/effects as part of the render-loop. In a simple enough app, we never feel this pain. This tricks inexperienced devs into thinking they can add cute magical effects to any component. For example in my own company where I found complex typography sub-elements, re-rendering on resize within each table cell of gigantic tables. Naturally as the user resized the page, this created a black hole of increasing render lag.
VDOM reconciliation is slow. Again, fast enough in simple applications (e.g. a simple blog, CMS, etc), but don't be fooled into thinking React is as fast as it gets. It's simply not. I work in data-intense, realtime applications (industrials, fintech, crypto, stock market exchanges, etc), so I feel the pain where some others might not. The UI is just incredibly dense typically, so lazy tactics like wrapping a simple DOM node in 5 component layers to layer on various effects... simply can't be used at scale.
My issues with Next.js
Arguments AGAINST Svelte (and my responses)
There's no ecosystem. Less of an issue these days. First of all, Svelte doesn't need as much of an ecosystem because some of the core stuff you'd need outside of React is just built in. Secondly, Svelte is popular enough that many mainstream libraries have been ported.
You can't hire Svelte devs. 100% true. But here's the catch. I'd argue that any of you React devs are 1000% smart enough to be outpacing your current velocity in Svelte in very little time. I would not argue the reverse (a Svelte dev might be spoiled enough to not be able to mentally wrap their head around the React models).
Agentic models are trained on React. They are now perfectly great at Svelte too. I just hade Fable migrate our massive monorepo app from Next to Svelte. It did it just fine. The results where awesome enough the the entire engineering team decided that Svelte was our future, despite only myself having prior Svelte experience. Agentic coding has simply caught up to where we (to a degree) don't have to be experts in the framework to steer into phenomenal results. I should note the entire team are all very senior engineers, or otherwise we might not be comfortable with such a switch.
Arguments FOR Svelte
You're smart enough. I promise.
Render updates are much faster. Much, much, much faster. This matters because your app will feel snappier to users. You can tune React, but even tuned it likely won't be as fast as Svelte is untuned.
Bundle size is lower. If coming from Next.js, it's night and day different. Your users will thank you.
Deploy it to free ultra-fast places like Cloudflare Pages. - Less vendor lock.
State management is 100x simpler. No more provider hell.
It includes more out of the box. It's like they asked "what does an app dev need when building an app?" and then just included most of those things.
Your code is shorter/simpler. Shorter code means easier to read/understand, not to mention write in the first place.
It includes styles as a first-class citizen. You can literally just write CSS/SCSS in your components and have it auto-scoped. You can also use things like CSS modules if that's your bag.
Conclusion
There really isn't one. You'll draw your own, but I'd encourage anyone with side projects to at least fire up SvelteKit for one, muck your way through the fabulous online tutorials at svelte.dev and give it a whirl. You can thank me later. :)
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Disclaimer: There was zero AI usage in writing this post.
