React Won. So Why Does Everything Feel Broken?

React launched with a clear goal: to proudly only be the V in MVC. In the world of frameworks, where Angular and Ember ruled, React planted its flag as a UI library with no opinions about routing or state.

Over 10 years later, we now see they skipped the entire framework step and went on to become a platform. Server Components, the compiler, multiple output modes. These platform decisions reshaping our mental models on how we think about building for the web.

While React was busy becoming infrastructure, the actual web platform kept evolving. The browser is more capable than ever, yet most developers never reach for any of it. React casts such a long shadow that the real platform underneath has become invisible.

AI is making this worse. AI, as the self-referential technology it is, has been trained to enforce past winners rather than future ones. Ask an AI to build a UI and it will reach for React by default, regardless of whether React is the right tool.

React won by pushing the web forward, but now it holds us back.

It is time for whatever comes next. I have been building with React for well over ten years. In 2014 a stranger thanked me for helping bring pure function components into React, and I have spent the years since writing, speaking, doing podcast, and building open source tooling around it. Nobody is more surprised than me that I am making this argument, but here we are.