10 years, and yet any discussion on this site about front-end development will be filled with people complaining about how front-end development practices change too quickly.
React development has had multiple major changes over that time span, as far as what's culturally allowed & encountered in the wild (if not what's technically possible). Just-functions, classes-and-functions mixed as appropriate, redux becoming a nigh-standard, the HOF invasion, hooks, and classes becoming deprecated.
To be fair, React itself has changed in fundamental ways multiple times throughout that period. And it's not like React is the only thing you need to worry about when building a React app: there's a whole ecosystem of tooling and libraries that you rely on which are constantly moving.
What common, popular and highly used technology hasn't radically changed in the last decade?
Back in 2015, $JOB was evaluating upgrading Java 6 to Java 7 or 8. What is now? 20?
I last touched php in 2012, which was 5.4 or 5.5 I think. People were still arguing that Laravel couldn't replace CodeIgnitor, or that we should stick with Symphony or Zend.
Change is the only constant. In that respect, React has been relatively sane.
As you know, Java and PHP are languages. React is just a framework, and by design not a particularly robust one on its own. It just provides a front end, everything else has to be plugged in separately, learned, maintained, and ultimately cast aside and forgotten separately.
If you're a React developer, you'll have noticed that Javascript itself has changed a lot in ten years. The state management library your company uses has probably changed too. Compared to ten years ago, you're now writing fully-typed JS with Typescript. The additional libraries for authentication and persistence, and so on, have all changed as well. You may be using a graph-based database now. You may have a different JS runtime on the server. All of your tooling has probably changed, as has your IDE.
Whether React itself has or has not changed more than other frameworks, I can't say. But, I'd bet the stack used by the average front end developer has. Please recall that the original comment we're both talking about was referring to complaints about how much the front end has changed, with React only being the context of the comment, and not the sole cause of the complaint.
> Ok then, what about the Spring .xml to .java migration? What about the Struts -> Struts2 -> SpringMVC -> SpringWebapp migrations.
When I started my first programming job 14 years ago xml was already not recommended and SpringMVC was already the way of doing things. So that's quite a bit stabler and slower than React.
Just as much as I had to rewrite anything in React. We stayed with Redux with Context became available. We stayed with classes when Hooks was released.
