React lets you suck in 80 components from 15 different vendors and it works. NPM lets you suck in more dependencies than many other systems because it deals with diamond dependencies better than other systems [1]

Because you can mix and match so many widget sets no wonder you will have trouble when those widget sets change.

[1] package A can import version B of package C, package D can import version E of package C -- so long as A and D don't exchange objects from package C there is never a problem, even if they do it might work.

React itself is an exception which is well-developed because a competent developer team (Facebook's) depends on it. The vast majority of JS libraries are absolute garbage from idea to implementation to maintenance. Nobody should be depending on these libraries, and yet the vast majority of JS projects do depend on these libraries.

You can certainly run into similar problems in, for example, Python, if you decide to import all of pip with impunity, and there are certainly Python projects with this problem that I've worked on. But Python at least has a core group of commonly used libraries that keep sane dependency trees. You literally can't build modern JavaScript without using some bleeding edge nonsense that won't work in a few years.

Thankfully, as I've said before, you don't have to use the mainstream toolchains. Browsers and standards organizations have been much better about at least not breaking reverse compatibility.

That's a problem with your build system then, not React. There is (or was) indeed a lot of churn in build systems, but you wouldn't have been spared unless you had chosen to not use a build system - which is still possible with React, but not with Svelte, Vue or Angular.

My current position on build systems is that if it doesn't work out of the box with esbuild, I'm not using it. If it does work out of the box with esbuild, then it's likely also going to work with whatever comes after.

This side conversation started as an objection to the comment, "Whatever framework you choose will be obsolete in 5 years."

The first release of esbuild was November 2020, i.e. it didn't exist 5 years ago. And that release fixed... conditional statements in TypeScript--a pretty basic feature to be broken. Does that sound like something you want to use in production?

So maybe your strategy of only using things that work with esbuild doesn't address the problem as much as you think it does.

Conditional types (not statements) are not a basic feature.

I've been writing JavaScript that entire time, and the complete disregard for maintenance has gotten worse, not better.

You seem to be under the impression that because I also write other languages, I haven't been keeping track of what's happening in the JS ecosystem, but you're wrong--I still write JS, because I often don't have any other option.

The fact that I work in other languages means I get to see what I like about better-managed ecosystems. If you're writing JS on both frontend and backend and not using anything else, it's likely that you don't know how bad things are for you because the JS churn has been normalized for you.

Did you read the sentence that you're "correcting"?

> My current position on build systems is that if it doesn't work out of the box with esbuild, I'm not using it. If it does work out of the box with esbuild, then it's likely also going to work with whatever comes after.

Your optimism is admirable.

People arguing with me here don't seem to remember this breaking like 1/2 the JS builds in existence for a few days.