Yeah, pretty much we had vanilla JS, then jQuery, then Webpack and React. TypeScript has probably crossed that threshold maybe in the last 12 months.

I’m trying to think of other frontend technologies that were truly dominant that went away. Maybe SCSS? But TBH if you’re still using SCSS with React today that’s not a bad stack. There’s no consensus on what the successor to SCSS is, Tailwind is a wild experiment. The styled components model is still being refined.

Things like Next, Radix, MUI, etc… these are probably all best skipped. They are highly experimental, and I’ve used all of them in production on major web apps and they’re half baked. I avoid them.

It’s easy to get sucked into the trends… I love Vite for example, but anyone who ahas stuck with Webpack made the right call… Vite is still working out key points of integration like Jest.

If you take JavaScript Twitter seriously, you’d think you HAVE to learn React Server Components. But it’s not even out of beta yet, and debates are raging about whether it’s even a good separation of concerns.

The key is: wait until things are _actually_ dominant before jumping ship. If you do that, you’ll be fine.

... besides the change towards hooks and the react dev team which does not seem to be clear about how to best use them.

The new beta docs just recently changed again removing old best practices concerning dependency arrays in useEffect hooks in favor of a new potential hook called useEffectEvent (which is still experimental).

I love to work with react. However, it takes _a lot of time_ onboarding new engineers for tasks which are a bit more complicated in nature. Also, using hooks the wrong way can really mess up your product big times.

It would be nice to see react moving in a direction which is by design/architecture less error-prone.