Lots of nuggets of truth in the article.
Dev Experience vs User Experience is mentioned.
On my part, I never jumped on vite, because the only argument I've heard for it, is faster dev builds. But my current builds are fast enough (I grew up with 40+ minute compile/link cycles in C++).
And I don't have a week to change my current scaffolding. If you do things right in your company you never have a week to change such a tool. Because that's a week you could spend on relevant features and bugs. Heavily advocating tool changes are fast-track to become a "problem engineer".
Also, yes, React has aged very poorly, and even more so, the ecosystem around it is rotting hard. It's moldy.
But it's still very good and is almost perfect. Maybe instead of writing a new framework, we should consider doing a React 2.0 with batteries included.
If a 30 second build can be cut to 15 seconds, for 20 engineers, assuming a conservative 10 save-file commands per workday (HMR!): this change converts ~216 engineer-hours per year from non-productive to potentially-productive. Given an average 40 hour work week, you could task one engineer on this change for five weeks and still come out ahead.
This is the calculus. Vite isn't built for the "lone ex-C++ dev" shop. Its built for teams that can run this calculus and realize that, 80% of the time, investments in speeding up the software development lifecycle are among the highest leverage, most direct correlates to productive output a software shop can make.
Seems like an excessively conservative approach imo. If advocating for tool changes wasn't important sometimes, I don't think it would be relevant to cite some much slower process.
Sometimes the tools suck, and sometimes you need to improve that situation, ideally in a gradual fashion. Sometimes they're passable, and there are other priorities, but usually tools start showing their rust eventually.
I also think it's extreme to say it's aged "very" poorly. It provides a relatively productive way to express UI as composable state machines, and now it just has a solid ecosystem of viable competitors.
On my part, I never jumped on vite, because the only argument I've heard for it, is faster dev builds. But my current builds are fast enough (I grew up with 40+ minute compile/link cycles in C++).
And I don't have a week to change my current scaffolding. If you do things right in your company you never have a week to change such a tool. Because that's a week you could spend on relevant features and bugs. Heavily advocating tool changes are fast-track to become a "problem engineer".
Also, yes, React has aged very poorly, and even more so, the ecosystem around it is rotting hard. It's moldy.
But it's still very good and is almost perfect. Maybe instead of writing a new framework, we should consider doing a React 2.0 with batteries included.