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Comment by DandyDev | Hacker News Reader

So now you need a framework on top of React - itself a framework. Has React really become so complex that mere mortals cannot comprehend it without another abstraction layer on top?

And the first suggestion for this extra abstraction layer is NextJS, developed by a company with a vested interest to make it hard to run your app on anything else than their own service.

Seems to me that the time is ripe to disrupt frontend development yet again and introduce a simpler stack.

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>So now you need a framework on top of React - itself a framework.

You definitely do not need any framework for react, you don't even need a build step. And react is not a framework. Not that it has objective meaning, but I think these frameworks are not abstraction layers on react, they are tools sitting along side it to make things easier or give more features. You still interface the same with writing the same old jsx.

> you don't even need a build step

You're not going to be popular if you write React code with React.createElement() instead of JSX. I know this from experience.

Hahaha... you actually tried this?

window.rce = React.createElement

Nope, you can use React just including it in your html page. All the added complexity is to give you a better dev experience if you need a highly interactive web application. Routing, linting, types, server rendering, state managing, static files, etc. You don't need all this if you're not developing web applications. You can write html and js and be happy.

React is a user interface library. It doesn't do anything to dictate how you structure your code or help with your larger application.

> Has React really become so complex that mere mortals cannot comprehend it without another abstraction layer on top?

Wrong purpose. The extra layer provides things React never had, like URL routing.

Nobody knows how to write react anymore.

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