Finishing my train of thought about why React is here to stay (for now).

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React has been around for almost 10 years, and it has pioneered so many things that we now take for granted. React allowed us to abstract our UI into components and couple functionality (JS) with markup (HTML) in a declarative, reusable way. React gave us a predictable way to render our UI.

Why React isn't dying

I’m a strong <code>Svelte</code> advocate so my opinion is definitely biased, but I believe React is becoming PHP of JS frameworks. It’s still incredibly popular and widely used, but it’s losing momentum for the current size. And fewer developers enjoy using the technology compared to other options. As such, I believe developers that are able to pick their own framework will start choosing alternatives while older companies that prefer building technical debt than redesigning will maintain their React code base without desire to change

If it ever dies it better not be immediately after I finish learning it…

There’s currently way too much movement in the JS framework market. All the current new frameworks have great features. I personally tried out Svelte and SolidJS, and am eyeing Astro and Qwik. All cool!
However: if you plan a long running, serious project - can you afford to use a young framework, that’s prone to change or even disappear in favour of the next best thing?
React (and also Vue for example) have a few things going for it: large developer base, easy to hire for, large surrounding culture, many available components for all kinds of tasks.
React simply is “good enough” for pretty much everything. Yes it’s nice to only deliver 5kb of JS at first render. Now hand that project over to your client who will add a 20mb PNG as the background image.

Cuz, React and it’s frameworks (NextJs, Gatsby etc) provides everything that a web developer needs!

I’m astonished that “couple functionality (JS) with markup (HTML)” is presented as a good thing and not exactly what’s wrong with modern frameworks