Web components are neat but they don't solve the problem React solves. React provides a simple mental model for managing client state, which is the one of the main challenges in frontend. It's basically, "re-render everything when one of your dependencies changes" -- and that's extremely easy to understand and reason about. It incurs significant performance overhead, but your app has to be fairly large before you start running into meaningful perf issues.
An outsiders perspective: react LOOKS like a simple mental model because all the front-end folks got used to it. Its not simple, its not intuitive, and this fact fundamentally makes it a bad framework: mediocre engineers often end up using it wrong because of this.
I've had an easier time learning Vue than React, and I've probably spent much longer trying to learn react. And if im not wrong, AI writes better Vue code than react code as well.
React is simple. When you really think about your data model, you’ll find out that you only need a handful of global properties, and the rest is data derivation and integration to your API or your storage layer.
Most issues stem from developers refusing to read the docs and to plan their presentation layer.
I agree with some of this. I find react unintuitive. I find it infrutating how many hoops I have to jump through to get things done in react. In the past, I've only looked at UI as a thing I tack on after writing the core functionality. So I go write the core functionality. Then I try to add a react UI on top. Suddently it requires me to re-write my entire core because it wants control of all state. No other UI system I've used does this.
If what you wrote is truly a core, you’ll only need to write a few functions to translate it to the reactive pattern. You already know the state of your core and the events that drive its transition, matching it to React’s is often pretty straightforward.
How do you handle state that affects multiple components? Like a filter button that affects a list table. In React you just hoist the state up and make both components dependent. If you're managing all state via internal component state, then you need to explicitly pass state between the components. That's okay for simple cases, but in my experience it breaks down pretty quickly. Once you have more than a few components involved, you end up writing your own state reconciliation.
That's why I wrote Lit State, a simple state management lib to use in combination with Lit, a simple web components lib. It works really simple, and it's simple to use. Much more intuitive than React.
