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A static React site, an Express backend, and a REST API is hardly exotic

Yeah and if that's all people used, JS would be the best language ecosystem ever.

Too bad I can't even remember the last time I jumped on a project with less than 80 dependencies.

Seems redundant to have a Express backend + REST API, why can't you just build your REST API on the Express backend?

And also, React is complex, hardly anyone seems to know the internals. The API interface might be easy to learn, but "simple" is not something that you should label React with.

why can't you just build your REST API on the Express backend

Pretty sure he means to set up the REST api in Express with a few simple routes.

JS is not complex, and pretty vanilla choice. It’s what people add on top of it that gives it a bad name. I’ll link to this guy so you can understand:

https://kentcdodds.com/blog/how-i-built-a-modern-website-in-...

^ This is the problem, not JavaScript.

I'm not sure I understand why people build websites like that. My theory would be that usually at some point you have to go lower in the stack (learn how Linux/Node/V8 work or stuff like that). You can avoid going lower in the stack, but the complexity has to go somewhere, and that's what we see here.

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