Its only a circus if you're constantly chasing the new shiny thing. Many of us have been productively building apps in react for nearly a decade without significant changes in tooling.
So qualify "building apps in react" with whatever bespoke build system, router, state management, etc combination you are actually using.
Just because you found yourself a tent inside the circus doesn't mean it's not a circus.
Frontend is a mishmash of random components and packages, unless you are 100% sure in advance what are you going to use and and do chances are that you’ll run into with issues with the latest version of package X not working with build system Y due to cryptic incomprehensible reasons unless you make sure to stick with the latest “mainstream” trends (which seem to change ever 1-2 years).
You could say the same about developing in Clojure, or Rust or Golang, but somehow you typically only see this same tired rhetoric applied to JavaScript.
The rhetoric applied to JS is fully valid and justified.
Things also change in all language ecosystems. Does anyone use lein these days? Not really.
This is utterly jaw-dropping. There is simply no way to respond to this, since the Everest mountain representing the JS reality directly contradicts this. Its like saying one does not experience Newton's laws of motion. I think you should definitely hold a poll with the community. You would be the super, ultra minority who would hold this position. The only you would have avoided breaking stuff is if you stuck to plain old JS, avoided use of all frameworks, maintained all libraries yourself and did not use any build infrastructure. There is utterly no other possible way you have gone a decade without stuff breaking. React has changed so much - its tooling, libs, best-practices and idioms in the last decade alone.
Comparing the JS versus Go ecosystem is like comparing a mad-max kraken with ten-thousand tentacles surfing the waves and wild on steroids vs a boring container freight-ship placidly making its way across the ocean.
But yes, it can be fun to surf on the kraken.
React router for routing, since.. as long as I can remember.
This notion that the ground is constantly shifting beneath you just hasn't been true for over a decade.
Use CRA + webpack, now use Vite instead, you know what? Screw CRA you should just immediately jump to Next.js instead (which seemed like a huge overkill initially, but actually seems kind of nice).
Unless you’re working on a single project or continuously following what’s new it just seems confusing and overwhelming. If I got comfortable with CRA and came back after a year or two should I still use it for a new project even if it’s bo longer the default? Will new packages/etc. still work with it? Maybe… who knows. I just know that I now have to waste time figuring that out.
When React "is just a library" but the installation instructions tell you to install some large, VC-backed framework immediately - it just doesn't sit right with me.