Second-guessing the modern web (2020)
One thing I&#x27;ve seen happen again and again in a lot of technologies is a &quot;framework gravity&quot;. A lot of people see this as engineers just wanting to work on &quot;hype&quot; technology but I think what is actually happening is a reflection of global engineering time.<p>React is great for SPAs. Most large companies are working on honest-to-god SPAs. By extension most <i>engineers</i> are working on SPAs. So most tooling is created for SPAs. Now if you aren&#x27;t building an SPA you look around and find almost every resource is around building an SPA. Even if you know you don&#x27;t need an SPA, it&#x27;s easier to hire, iterate, and even use other open source solutions if you are building an SPA, so you try to hamfist your project into an SPA.<p>It&#x27;s a bit like having a bike commute in America. A bike might be the best thing for you to do - cheaper than a car, keeps you healthy and you don&#x27;t need a garage. But you quickly find that everything is built for cars and it&#x27;s easier to deal with the disadvantages of a car than try to commute with a bike.<p>I remember thinking the same thing about Hadoop 5-6 years ago. If you had &quot;small data&quot; you could get what you wanted with SQL and fast disks. But <i>everything</i> else assumed you were on Hadoop. Newgrads were trained in hadoop. New tools were Hadoop first. New research was all hadoop. If you hit a small issue with your DB, almost every solution would be &quot;this is how it&#x27;s solved in Hadoop&quot;. It was hard to even know if what you were trying to do what even possible without Hadoop.<p>The only optimism I have is that maybe in 5 years we will all collectively wake up and stop trying to shove React everywhere just like we stopped with Hadoop.