TL;DR: Stop using React for EVERYTHING. It's not the end-all solution to every application need.

My team is staffed about 50/50 with tenured devs, and junior devs who have never written a full application and don't understand the specific benefits of different libraries/framworks. As a result, most of these junior devs have jumped on the React train, and they're under the impression that React is the end-all answer to any possible application need. Doesn't matter what type of app is, what kind of data is going to be flowing through the app, data scale, etc. In their eyes, React is always the answer. Now, while I'm not a big fan of React myself, I will say that it does its job when its tasked with a data-heavy application that needs to be refreshed/re-rendered dynamically and frequently (like Facebook.) However, my main gripe is that some people insist on using it for EVERYTHING. They refuse to acknowledge that there can be better library/framework choices (Angular, Vue, or even straight jQuery,) and they refuse to learn any other frameworks. You can hit them with countless technical reasons as to why React isn't a good choice for a particular application, and they'll just spout off the same tidbits from the "ReactJS Makes My Nips Hard 101" handbook: "React is the future," "Component-based web architecture is the future," (I'm not arguing with that last one) "But...JSX bro.," "Facebook and Netflix use it, so that's how you know it's amazing." They'll use React for a simple app, and make it overly-complex, and take months to write something that should have taken them a week. For example, we have one dev who has never used any other frameworks/libraries apart from React, and he used React (via create-react-app) to write what is effectively a single form and a content widget inside of a bootstrap template. It took him 4 MONTHS to write this, and it still isn't fully functioning. The search functionality doesn't really work (in fact, it's just array filtering,) and wont return any results if you search for the first word in an entry. His repo is a mess, filled with a bunch of useless files that were bootstrap'd in via create-react-app. We've built apps like this in a week in the past using different libraries/frameworks, and he could have done the same if he didn't overly-complicate the project by insisting on using React. If your app is essentially a dynamic form, you don’t need a freaking virtual DOM.

This happens every time a big new framework hits the scene. New young developers get sucked into it, because it's the cool hip new framework (or in React's case, library.) and they use it for everything, even when it's not the best choice. It happened with Angular, Rails, and now it's happening with React.

React has its benefits, but please please please consider which library/framework is the best choice from a technical standpoint before immediately jumping on the React train because "Facebook uses it bro."

My favorite quote from an article (jokingly) poking fun at React:

"I mentioned to a junior developer that his return function was getting a little unsightly with the lengthy JSX that he’d put in his render function. He told me, “Oh it’s cool. I’ll break it out into several functions that return JSX.”

I pushed him into a volcano.

The gods smiled upon us and we had rain."

Just the fact that you wrote your simple single page "contact us" website in React shows that you have no idea what you're doing, nor do you have any idea what the actual benefits of React are and in what situations it actually shines. You're just jumping on the React bandwagon for the sake of saying "I wrote it in React," and your decision to use React for that simple website is going to effectively increase It's development time without adding any additional benefits.

Each framework has its advantages and disadvantages. It's worth it to pay attention to these advantages/disadvantage, and choose the best framework to fit your needs. Don't just use a particular framework because it's the hot new craze. Use a framework because it's the right choice from a technical standpoint, and presents you with advantages that fit your application needs.

Welcome to JSX

My first rant. Woohoo!

Honestly I do the whole shebang ussualy depending on what the needs are from network to servers to coding because for some reason nobody has any technical experience where I work.
I just started app development for a gamedev startup and I am in sheer awe of the amount of transpiling/compiling etc that needs to be done for an multiplatform app for iOS and android with js(x)/typescript, html, css.

I remember when I could just write some spaghetti code to make it working by following a couple of tutorials. Then refractoring and testing it for a couple of hours and be done with it. push it into production.

Now I am lost having to learn OOP, functional programming, reactjs, react native, express, webpack, mongodb, babel, and the list goes on and on...
Why not just make a new backend that does all of that in another language which supports all of that.

I have no formal education in programming/coding and the last time I learned JS it was just some if else, switches and simple dom manipulation.

I just want to get to coding a freakin' game but I have to learn JSX for the front and typescript on the backend.

I am this close to going back to ye ol' lamp stack and quitting this job. 😥

To the reactjs-centered fucks who develop the popular web component viewing software called storybook: have you ever heard about semver?
89 alpha/beta/rc releases for a minor update 6.3 -> 6.4 with "100's of fixes and enhancements" "in preparation of the HUGE 7.0 release". Gee I wonder will it have 1000's of bugfixes? How bug-ridden is this software?
Every minor upgrade since 5.x is backwards-incompatible and requires a day of frustration finding out in how many more fucking NPM packages you split your codebase just because it's cool. I know move fast and break things, but some of us have other things to do than resolving node_modules incompatibilities you know. "No just hit 'npx sb upgrade' you say". I did, I really did! And the browser showed a blank screen of death with tons of cryptic React errors, it really did! Thank God you abstracted away all your dependencies in that sb command, now you can't even read the docs about what could have gone wrong with a specific sub-package. You have @storybook/html but the docs redirect to React pages, so good luck if you use something else

This is so sad... like.. the IDEA of storybook is great. But why did faith put the capacity to develop such a tool into the hands of people who think the world centers around React and JSX.. HTML should have been the default, and then you build on top of that for your fav framework, not the other way around