Having used react and modern web components to build webpages. I will agree with the first comment which says what is made so hard by react/redux can be easily done if the pages were rendered on server and delivered to client with progressive smaller bits of JavaScript for dynamic interaction.
If state management is so critical to running a react app than I feel Elm/ClojureScript is a better choice than react to build web apps. But I doubt they will be as popular given network effect.
Now everyone went on a bandwagon that react/angular/SPA/progressive apps is the only future and plain HTML/CSS/JS mix on server side with specific language templates is dead. I am sure we will again go full circle back as you can see now with SSR (server side rendering) is considered as a norm for performant react or angular apps. SSR combined with complexity of react/redux unnecessarily makes everything complicated (worse than even complex). Instead of doing HTML templates in nicer language on server side now people are forced with half baked solution on client side like JSX or angular templates etc.
A developer not just need to learn intricacies of HTML/CSS/JS, but then API's of framework like react, combine it with state management framework, combine it with client side templates, combine it with build tools like gulp, webpack, combine it with NPM, Yarn, combine it with babel compiler, combine it with many testing frameworks. The whole eco-system is very complicated (not just complex).
This is one of the reason for emergence of compiler based web application development language and frameworks like Svelte, Elm, ClojureScript, PureScripts. They will still be not popular because there is a network effect of jobs available. So inferior tools for user interface like react/angular will continue to thrive.
> Now everyone went on a bandwagon that react/angular/SPA/progressive apps is the only future and plain HTML/CSS/JS mix on server side with specific language templates is dead
Well it is not dead, but with the rise of Webapps (not Websites!) come use-cases you can only handle with SPAs. One major example is the new youtube feature, where the video playback is not interrupted when you click on a link somewhere (the video stays at the right bottom corner of the page and keeps plaing). No way to do this with SSR.
Other examples include staying in fullscreen mode (think automatic playback of video playlists) - with SSR, every video change would trigger a page reload and thus require user interaction to go back to fullscreen.
SPAs are not required for Websites, but for Webapps there are a lot of cases where SSR is not possible or would result in poor UX.
If state management is so critical to running a react app than I feel Elm/ClojureScript is a better choice than react to build web apps. But I doubt they will be as popular given network effect.
Now everyone went on a bandwagon that react/angular/SPA/progressive apps is the only future and plain HTML/CSS/JS mix on server side with specific language templates is dead. I am sure we will again go full circle back as you can see now with SSR (server side rendering) is considered as a norm for performant react or angular apps. SSR combined with complexity of react/redux unnecessarily makes everything complicated (worse than even complex). Instead of doing HTML templates in nicer language on server side now people are forced with half baked solution on client side like JSX or angular templates etc.
A developer not just need to learn intricacies of HTML/CSS/JS, but then API's of framework like react, combine it with state management framework, combine it with client side templates, combine it with build tools like gulp, webpack, combine it with NPM, Yarn, combine it with babel compiler, combine it with many testing frameworks. The whole eco-system is very complicated (not just complex).
This is one of the reason for emergence of compiler based web application development language and frameworks like Svelte, Elm, ClojureScript, PureScripts. They will still be not popular because there is a network effect of jobs available. So inferior tools for user interface like react/angular will continue to thrive.