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Comment by wesleytodd | Hacker News Reader

I am a professional developer who primarily uses React and I actively avoid most of this. I keep up with the community so know (or at least know about) almost all of this, but choose not to use it all.

The direction I have seen react go is exactly the opposite of the reason I liked it in the first place. It was simple and JUST A VIEW LAYER. How it became all of this is just typical software devs over complicating things for themselves IMO.

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This is too dismissive of the reasons the ecosystem is the way it is. Sure, there is definitely some amount of over-engineering and NIH going on in the community, but every solution exists for a reason, and if a lot of people are using something (e.g. Redux), chances are that it solves a very real problem for those people.

There are times this backfires (AngularJS, react-router), but to say that all these tools popping up "is just typical software devs over complicating things" is a bit short-sighted. If they didn't solve problems, they wouldn't be as popular as they are.

I think the problem many developers see is the expectation that a "react developer" needs to know most of these things to call themselves such. It's a very similar issue to what many have with the term "full stack developer".

It's a big leap between "I can get the job done if you want me to write some react code" and "I can write you an enterprise app in react", but both of those can be inferred as react development.

This. You don't even have to use react if you understand one way binding flow, entire dom update logic can be written in 100-200 lines of code.

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