It requires constant attention and vigilance, but that's better for everyone than having some kind of "moat" that lets them start coasting or worse— lets them start diverting focus to features that are relevant for their enterprise sales team but not for developers using the software.

Companies really should have to stay competitive on features and developer happiness. A moat by definition is anti-competitive.

I detoured into heavier focus on backend work for quite a while, concurrent with the rise of React, and watched its rise with suspicion because it seemed like such an inefficient way to do things. That, and JSX's limitations around everything having to be an expression made me want to gauge out my eyes.

Still, React pushed and laid the foundation for some really important paradigm shifts in terms of state management. The path from the old mental models around state to a unidirectional flow of immutable data... re-learning a totally new mental model was painful, but important.

Even though it's been chaotic at times, React has delivered a lot of value in terms of innovation and how we conceptualize web application architecture.

But today, when you compare it to something like SolidJS, it's really clear to see how Solid delivers basically all the same benefits, but in an architecture that's both simpler and more performant. And in a way that's much easier to organize and reason about than React. You still get JSX, server components, reactive state management (actually a MUCH better and cleaner foundation for that) and any React dev could move to Solid with fairly little mental re-wiring of the neural pathways. It doesn't require you to really change anything about how you think about application architecture and structure. It just basically does everything React does but better, faster, and with drastically smaller bundle sizes.

Yet I still have to begrudgingly use React in several contexts because of the industry-wide inertia, and I really wish I didn't have to.

It kind of recaptures part of the intangible sense of flipping through the old physical pages to see what catches the mind's interest. This feels substantively different from the current way that we discover and stumble upon things in the modern web and especially mobile app ecosystems with infinite scroll and algorithmically curated feeds.

When people who are not thinking in that bigger-scale, zoomed-out, societal-level perspective conduct A/B testing or usability testing in a lab or focus group setting, they focus on the wrong metrics (the ones that make an immediate, short-term KPI go up) and then promote the resulting objectively worse UX designs as being evidence-based and data-driven.

It has been destroying software usability for the last 20 years and doing a deep disservice to subsequent generations who are growing up without having been exposed to TRULY thoughtful UX except very rarely.

I will die on this hill.

That said, the site does desperately need a responsive redesign so that you don't need to do what I just described.

Gross.