Post

Reading through this is both fascinating and horrifying. It's hard not to start feeling like working with React is like being in a relationship with a partner who's gonna blow up at you if you say things the wrong way or with the wrong tone of voice and expects you to read their mind.

There are two aspects: the rule & how we enforce. The rule is simple: don’t mutate stuff that crosses JSX/hook boundaries. You almost certainly follow this ~all the time, else you would have crazy bugs. What feels and is more complex is that we can’t statically catch all violations of this rule.

The parts of the post describing subtle nuances are about which specific ways of breaking immutability the compiler does/doesn’t catch. But developers don’t need to remember which way of crafting an error will be caught or not! They just need to remember the rule, which is straightforward.