> Then I don't understand why you're writing an article about it? Just to rant about the React hype? That seems a bit pointless.
I mean, the thesis is "If you are building websites, you don’t need React (in most cases)." And it ends with "Knowing React could only make you a better developer, and I am not saying you shouldn’t learn it. However, I am saying that it is not needed in most cases if your goal is to build websites."
Whether you "need" something seems like a rather vapid bar to quibble over. You don't really "need" anything, but evaluating the trade-offs of using something is one of the primary roles of an engineer.
On HN, we too quickly circlejerk over whether a given project really "needed" some bit of tech and brag about how we could build it without, as if that's the metric that matters.
If you used React unnecessarily and the project is worse off for it, fine, you're still learning. But it all too often becomes one of these blog post rants with the extra whammy of people coming into the comments to brag about how they've been hand-coding HTML since 1999 and don't see the point of a tool like React or Javascript.
“You don’t need react for websites” would be the better headline. Even then you’d expect the author to have at least some experience using the tools in order to make a good critique or informative article.
Even a small preface that this doesn’t apply to web apps or business software etc.
This puts a lot of weight on the reader when it’s the authors job to communicate effectively when asking for people’s time investment.
I mean, the thesis is "If you are building websites, you don’t need React (in most cases)." And it ends with "Knowing React could only make you a better developer, and I am not saying you shouldn’t learn it. However, I am saying that it is not needed in most cases if your goal is to build websites."