Things you forgot (or never knew) because of React
Glad to see these ideas being shared more broadly. I&#x27;ve had enough of React. I lost my last job because of it and all associated technical debt. The company I worked for (a startup) turned into a kind of Darwinian Squid Game where those employees who were able to keep adding on top of the mess of tech debt at a fast rate were promoted and those who did not were let go. It became an absolute brainf**. Also, I had lost all motivation because there was no real engineering left to do; all the work was related to debugging React-specific gotchas&#x2F;issues which I hate doing.<p>React creates layer upon layer of unnecessary, opaque abstractions which make it harder to debug complex front ends and it encourages poor engineering practices. For example, I&#x27;ve seen a lot of cases of junior developers dump setInterval() calls all over the place into the code inside useEffect and not cleaning up afterwards... Causing memory leaks. But these devs can work so fast using React (to get features out in production quickly) that managers just love them and it&#x27;s difficult to convey to them that this is in fact a short-term approach and it will come back to bite them in the long term. The app at that startup had such awful memory leaks that my new computer would freeze a few times a day.<p>I feel like the new generation of devs got used to working with these abstractions and by some measures they seem highly competent, yet it feels like they&#x27;re missing some critical knowledge; like they don&#x27;t understand what&#x27;s happening under the hood. Sad because there&#x27;s actually a lot less happening under the hood than there is happening above it! You can solve many problems while staying closer to native browser features without all this complexity.