React v16.3.0: New lifecycles and context API
disclaimer: I don&#x27;t like react. Outside of dom node diffing and a focus on components I don&#x27;t think it brings much to the table considering the considerable complexity it brings.<p>It seems like react gets re-written and APIs undergoes drastic changes every few months. I&#x27;m not complaining about churn (I don&#x27;t write react), but rather that maybe React isn&#x27;t the right tool to be hyping up, or pointing newcomers to JS at to look into&#x2F;use.<p>I don&#x27;t remember any other supposedly simple library having had this many major rewrites&#x2F;api changes. I don&#x27;t think I&#x27;ve ever seen something like this in KnockoutJS or even Angular1 for a long time (even though the way you had to handle $scope and apply&#x2F;digest cycles was terrible). Relative newcomers like Mithril and Vue seem to get this stuff right without requiring as much breaking changes. Maybe they owe their simplified structures to some of the new thought to what React inspired, but it seems like they&#x27;re actually simple (Vue&#x27;s documentation is amazing, concise, and you can actually render Vue in the browser to get started quickly).<p>Maybe it&#x27;s time to rethink whether React is a good tool. There&#x27;s no way I would recommend React to anyone (beginner or intermediate) over something like Vue these days.<p>For example, I don&#x27;t know what HOC (and am thoroughly uninterested, it sounds like the same kind of thing you only need to know when you&#x27;re chest-deep in React land) is but it sounds like a hack necessary because of a bad design decision.<p>[EDIT] - Took a few seconds to look up HOCs (Higher Order Components) and they&#x27;re a bad example of what I think is incidental complexity inside React but I think my point still stands. To clarify, here&#x27;s my thesis:<p>React is complex (both internally, evidenced by multiple rewrites, and with the tooling it forces you to use, evidenced by needing to download a zip file to start, or touch webpack), but masquerades as a simple library.