But it also feels like there was a similar discussion on his other articles just a year ago on /r/reactjs, which I’m going to generalize and say might be less jaded than HNers:
https://reddit.com/r/reactjs/comments/fcvqnl/stop_using_islo...
Many people picked on the distributed nature of the app, along with auth, but I was personally taken aback at the pushing of a pretty obscure, heavy handed state machine library in ‘modern frontend in 2021’, especially just as we are exiting the Redux era into more ergonomic solutions to state management.
There’s a lot of reasonable feedback here, and it all kind of falls under the theme that this guy is pushing a misguided curriculum. I’m not even a fan of Redux, but modest usage of the useSelector hook is far more sensible than xState (or even better, the myriad of newer alternatives that boil Redux down even more to something even simpler). This an important discussion to me personally because I always wonder how newer developers get these concepts fed to them, and voila, here it is.
It’s not hurting anyone and if anything is helping people with their careers.
Unfortunately, I think a good deal of working professionals on HN can agree that it is hurting our codebases, and the overall Frontend community has achieved consensus for some time now that we’ve been feeding bad guidance to everyone.
All I actually saw on his Twitter, and probably the Discord too (if I were to look), was a fanbase providing support. Objectively, all one can take away from that is that his paying customers like the product. That has no bearing on if the product is actually good, just that some people were either accurately or inaccurately assessing the value of it. HN can certainly be full of haters, but it does have a pretty solid group of shrewd experienced developers that won’t appease and ordain things indiscriminately. In this case, as tough as the feedback was, I think HN got it right.