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.
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.