> If all you need is a couple of basic forms and some basic interaction, you can do it all with vanilla JS but let's not kid ourselves
This is a classic red-herring argument from developers who have not built anything complex with vanilla js. You can build rich interactions with or without a framework, you’re just making different trade-offs (conventions, learning curve, flexibility, tooling).
There is a much larger amount of man-hours put into browser APIs, and web components is one of them. I don’t see anything wrong or that warrants a “you’re wasting your time” warning in his argument. And note, he’s talking about the chrome dev tools everyone including the react team use daily, not “basic forms”.
Using web components makes your forms instantly inaccessible without JS. Browser APIs evolved over time and albeit most are pretty good nowadays, a lot of stuff is still bad in HTML world and frameworks like these solve that painpoint. The framework still allows usage of FormData and whatnot, there's even a new framework ontop of React now that aims for form handling without any JS at all in the browser so there are good reasons to adapt them.
And the fun part is that when you are going with the browser APIs like a responsible developers, do aim for backwards compatibility and browser support and all that jazz you will at some point also be annoyed to write a lot of imperative code to add a modal, add this field dynamically, handle class toggles and make another button somewhere change something else in the UI that it's inevitable that you write a poor-mans version of React that now no one knows how to maintain and onboard people.
React didn't come from PHDs in some university, it came from the real needs and desires of developers to just think in "I want my UI to look like this, get it done" and not in "Aight, I add a class here now, but update the value here, this button also needs to be disabled now and then make the request and if it fails then add this element for the error in this spot and enable the button again but if it works yeah just throw all of these away and replace it with a success message"
I’m not sure I can even make out what argument you’re trying to make, but let’s go.
Nowhere in the article the author claims web components is a great choice for everything. He works on DevTools, which is not a website, and 100% js already. Seems like a perfectly ok choice.
> be annoyed to write a lot of imperative code to add a modal
I’ve recently added a modal system to a react app using react-aria-modal, and no kidding, it took over 1000 lines of code* to get it working, following their guide to the letter. Later, out of frustration, I reimplemented the same feature using Svelte (which lets you get much closer to plain JS and HTML), with the same features and aria support, in a couple of hours and 10x less code.
> it's inevitable that you write a poor-mans version of React… it came from the real needs and desires of developers
React uses a very specific architecture of VDOM, stateful components, hooks etc. There are plenty of alternatives, including well developed “poor-man’s versions” like Preact, hyperapp or SolidJS.
It seems you’re under the impression React is some kind of universal solution to all frontend apps, developed by “the people”. It’s just a framework, developed at facebook, born from the evolution of their existing server component system. It works, feels nice for small apps, I use it along with a million other people, but it’s not a panacea, and it’s sad that a lot of people simply dismiss everything else before they’ve had a chance to actually understand the trade-offs.
* id say it’s imperative code too - calling hooks in the correct order, passing data from one to another, telling react what the dependencies are, updating and transforming values
You call the argument a red herring, then name all the reasons people use a framework over vanilla js: conventions, learning curve, flexibility, tooling.
Sure, the browser apis are great and always getting better, but I don't see how that's a reason not to use the framework.
This is a classic red-herring argument from developers who have not built anything complex with vanilla js. You can build rich interactions with or without a framework, you’re just making different trade-offs (conventions, learning curve, flexibility, tooling).
There is a much larger amount of man-hours put into browser APIs, and web components is one of them. I don’t see anything wrong or that warrants a “you’re wasting your time” warning in his argument. And note, he’s talking about the chrome dev tools everyone including the react team use daily, not “basic forms”.