You might say this is nitpicking, but not everything that's potentially harmful in its dispersed form is plastic. Asbestos, coal dust, and sand dust are not plastics.

For me, it's like calling any shiny metal 'silver' or calling any clear stone a 'diamond' - they may look similar, but they're completely different materials.

As for your question, “Why does everyone suddenly try to use it for spreading butter or peeling eggs?”

I guess part of the reason is that many people rely on older tutorials and patterns where the usage of useEffect was much more tolerated or even encouraged as a catch-all solution. There’s still a lot of inertia from the old componentDidThis/componentDidThat paradigm, with useEffect being its direct replacement.

I feel it is only a recent tendency to finally abandon the overuse of effect hooks.

Just open an average Stack Overflow React question, and you’ll see how many useEffects are crammed in there.

Most importantly, it’s also not particularly performant on the client side in real-world scenarios.

For evidence, here’s a guy testing major websites using his awesome react-scan tool: https://x.com/aidenybai/status/1861442057598062653

It feels like a clever proof of concept with a leaky abstraction at its core, one that no amount of effort can truly fix, no matter how much they throw at it. They’re even building their own compiler. A compiler. For something that’s supposed to represent the V in MVC.

As a SPA framework, it’s questionable. But using React to build server-side apps? That’s beyond absurd for me, it’s like Electron for the backend, only worse. And yet, the industry loves to pretend otherwise, so here we are.

“There,” “here,” psychological obliteration—what is this but sciency reasoning, on par with boomers claiming, “Games make kids violent”?

“Your entire whole self is destroyed.” Jeez.