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Default Isn’t Design

Framework monoculture is a psychology problem as much as a tech problem. When one approach becomes “how things are done,” we unconsciously defend it even when standards would give us a healthier, more interoperable ecosystem. Psychologists call this reflex System Justification.

The explains a lot about React-driven front-end development!

When a single toolset becomes the default, we don’t just prefer it, we build narratives that justify it. And that’s when a tool quietly becomes a gate or even a destructive force.

The Frontend Treadmill - These Yaks Ain’t Gonna Shave Themselves

Your teams should be working closer to the web platform with a lot less complex abstractions. We need to relearn what the web is capable of and go back to that.

Let’s be clear, I’m not suggesting this is strictly better and the answer to all of your problems. I’m suggesting this as an intentional business tradeoff that I think provides more value and is less costly in the long run.

React, Electron, and LLMs have a common purpose: the labour arbitrage theory of dev tool popularity – Baldur Bjarnason

An insightful and incisive appraisal of technology adoption. This truth hits hard:

React and the component model standardises the software developer and reduces their individual bargaining power excluding them from a proportional share in the gains. Its popularity among executives and management is entirely down to the fact that it helps them erase the various specialities – CSS, accessibility, standard JavaScript in the browser, to name a few – from the job market. Those specialities might still exist in practice – as ad hoc and informal requirements during teamwork – but, as far as employment is concerned, they’re such a small part of the overall developer job market that they might as well be extinct.

XML is the future - by Nobody has time for Python

I learned that geeks think they are rational beings, while they are completely influenced by buzz, marketing, and their emotions. Even more so than the average person, because they believe they are less susceptible to it than normies, so they have a blind spot.

The Industrial Hammer Complex

Coincidentally, I was just talking about hammers and nails in another context.

Progressive enhancement used to be a standard approach. Then React came along and didn’t support that approach. So, folks stopped talking about that and focused entirely on JS-centric client solutions. A few years later and now folks are talking about progressive enhancement again, under the new name of “islands”.

What is going on here?

It turns out, it’s the same old thing. Vendors peddling their wares. When Facebook introduced React, that act transformed the font-end space into a hype-driven, cult-of-personality disaster zone where folks could profit from creating the right image and narrative. I observed that it particularly preyed on the massive influx of young web developers. Facebook had finally found the silver bullet of Web Development, or so they claimed! Just adopt our tech, no questions asked, and you too can be a rock star making six figures! We’ve been living through this mess for ten years now.

The cosmic ballet goes on.