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Hawk Ticehurst
@hawkticehurst.com

🌶️: If we were still writing all our apps in vanilla web tech in 2026, the state of the web would be at least 100x worse than what it is today. React's model won because good abstractions are good! Creating better abstractions is like kind of the *entire* deal when it comes to programming / software

dan@danabra.mov

it’s always funny to me when people try to paint react as some kind of “big company” propaganda. it was like one person’s wild idea and then there was at most ~5 people maintaining it for years. people HATED it when fb open sourced it. the only reason it won is because the model was actually good

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Si Kelly
@si-kelly.bsky.social

Hawk have you been on the web in 2026? It's terrible! And you're saying thank God for React otherwise it would be 100x worse?! Your post made me wanna take that hot chilli and rub it in my eyes 😭

Hawk Ticehurst
@hawkticehurst.com

Lol yep. Imagine the same culture and economic incentives of 2026 but switch out React with plain JS. In that world, everyone has to write product code *and* roll their own client side routing, state management, efficient DOM updates, reusable UI, etc –– that world would absolutely be 100x worse.

Si Kelly
@si-kelly.bsky.social

I just think that you are giving React way too much credit. React didn't invent those things! What about Backbone, Ember, Angularjs, knockout, jQuery, Dojo, and thousands of other frameworks and libraries that came into being to support the move to SPAs and had to solve the same things?

Hawk Ticehurst
@hawkticehurst.com

Oh yeah, I’m not trying to claim React did. I’m also not even trying to say React’s model is the best there is — I’d point to Solid, Svelte, and Ripple instead. But React does get credit for popularizing all of these things in a way no other framework did before it — ergo React was a net positive.