This is some spin mastery. "yes you're right, React is bad, we're continuing to work on it and make it even better"

I mean, what did you think he was going to say? React is bad, we're dropping it?

"React is bad in your case, drop it." I know it's far out idea in tech, to flat out tell someone "you don't need this, you just save time and money and get a better result of you don't use what we made", but it shouldn't be.

React is fine per se, the problem is throwing these "simple, magic" solutions onto everything, without even caring what mountains of code end up running as a result. The minimum for a Discourse installation is 10 GB, for example, but PHP is the weird ecosystem, because reasons. I don't mean to pick on Discourse, but that's still crazy to me.

I personally liked how easy it was to install Discourse thanks to Dockerization, and don't care one whit about requiring 10GB of space (cheapest DigitalOcean droplet comes with 25GB).

Fine, but that kinda falls under "without even caring what mountains of code end up running as a result". You use 10 GB instead of a few MB, and get an easy installation vs. an easy installation.

It's like driving a huge truck everywhere, even to get the mail from our mailbox, because it starts up real fast and we don't have it far to the garage from our living rooms, and then later on because we haven't walked in so long, we don't even remember what it is. And especially with websites, people also tend to forget that their website isn't the only thing anyone ever runs on their machine, some have to share resources with dozens of tabs.

Discourse and software like it was not as easy to install. This was literally one-click. Installing wordpress and such in the past required installing PHP, MySQL, yada yada on your server to get everything running.

I've always felt like the vast majority of apps do not need to be on React. It's too low-level. Surely it makes more sense to just use a framework like Next or Ember, where you can focus on developing your product functionality (what sets you apart) rather than bikeshedding on routers, build configs, developer tooling, etc.

PHP is literally the reason I first used Kubernetes in anger because the sheer impossibility of getting sane deployment configuration without dockerization meant we had to get something that could manage them for us.

That's exactly what we wanted him to say. Use heavy tooling only where necessary and nowhere else. React is rarely necessary.

I think a lot of the problem is React's syntax and ecosystem is too complicated for the majority of sites out there. IMO using React to make static sites and regular CMS / document type sites is way overkill no matter how performance optimized it is.

I've been experimenting with Vue and I'm liking it more and more just for the simplicity.

Ract syntax is functions + jsx. Jsx has just a smal set of additional rules compared to ordinary html, so I would not call it complex. In Vue 2 you have directives and wierd object model where you store data, getteres, watchers, etc. Each library has its own set of things which needs to be learned, and for me both basic vue and react are easy.

Jsx is not complex but it adds additional cognitive load keeping in mind everything is still JS and the small differences between Html. Also the common libraries that people use in a React app tend to be overkill. Things like Flux/redux add way too much boilerplate for small-medium projects yet everyone uses it.

Server side rendering is a thing since React has been announced.

https://reactjs.org/docs/react-dom-server.html

Hasn't this hybrid model used by many for a long time already? SSR react as most as you can(try to avoid client-side routing), then hydrate/enhance parts of the page and make it dynamic.