Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

Context is useful for certain cases, but plain old useState/useReducers are the workhorses. I think the beta docs are pretty good about explaining the tradeoffs (https://beta.reactjs.org/learn/passing-data-deeply-with-cont...).

To me one of the biggest issue is that almost everyone is deeply afraid of prop drilling. Passing props around and having some local state works very well for large parts of many applications. With hooks we don't have deeply nested Higher-Order components anymore, if you pay a bit of attention you can have reasonably shallow component hierarchies and props work very nicely then.

Server-side state is a special case, I find that much easier to handle with something like React Query. But once that is done I don't see much need for any external state management library like Redux, useState/useReducer works pretty well.

And yes, sometimes Context is useful for state that doesn't change much. But those are the cases where the drawbacks don't matter. But that is a special case, not necessary for the vast majority of state.



> To me one of the biggest issue is that almost everyone is deeply afraid of prop drilling.

Prop Drilling is considered an anti-pattern for good reason.

It very quickly turns your project into an absolute mess, making it impossible to determine where props are coming from and where data is actually set.

Keeping that clean is one of the most important things you can do in a frontend codebase imo.


That doesn't make sense, props are easily to follow and they only flow in one direction from parent to children. Excessively deep component structures are a problem, but not only because of the excessive prop drilling they cause.


Except when props are callbacks, e.g. probably a useState combo.


imo this was definitely true in my experience before typescript/solid ide support.

With tsc and vscode, prop drilling has started to make a lot more sense to me.




Consider applying for YC's Winter 2026 batch! Applications are open till Nov 10

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: