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.
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.