Some software bloat is OK

If I could make one law related to software, it would be to ban React and React-like frameworks (includes Vue and Svelte I believe): if you have to put more than one line of HTML in your JavaScript, if you have VDOM, if you have a build step - I want this to be illegal. It is entirely possible to write a js-framework that attaches itself to DOM from the top, without any kind of expensive hydration steps or VDOM or templating (I've built one). React is a horrible complex monster that wastes developers time, heats up users' CPUs and generally feels super slow and laggy. 99% percent of websites would work a lot better with SSR and a few lines of JavaScript here and there and there is zero reason to bring anything like React to the table. React is the most tasteless thing ever invented in software.

> It is entirely possible to write a js-framework that attaches itself to DOM from the top, without any kind of expensive hydration steps or VDOM or templating (I've built one)

Can you elaborate more on how this works? Do you mean JS loading server generated HTML into the DOM?

Server renders the page. Suppose you have a element there which reads like <div data-component="HenloComponent">...</div>. Then the .js framework which was loaded on that page queries the DOM in search of any elements with data-component attribute and creates instances of HenloComponent (which is a class written by you, the developer, user of the framework). It's a bit more complicated than that, but that's the essence of it.

Note that with this approach you don't need to "render" anything, browser already done it for you. You merely attaching functionality to DOM elements in the form of Component instances.

Yes, that is what I was asking about.

I entirely agree. It is what I do when I have to - although I mostly do simple JS as I am a backend developer really, and if I do any front end its "HTML plus a bit of JS" and I just write JS loading stuff into divs by ID.

When i have worked with front end developers doing stuff in react it has been a horrible experience. In the very worst case they used next.js to write a second backend that sat between my existing Django backend (which had been done earlier) and the front end. Great for latency! It was an extreme example but it really soured my attitude to complex front ends. The project died.

Oh no, they do that? I thought Next.js is a fully functional backend itself, like Django. But I'm shocked to learn that it's just a middleman-backend to render templates that are already served from another backend.