Often choosing the most popular is like "Million flies cannot be wrong, shit is good." New technology is created to improve things, so it would not exist and people would not use it, unless there is something to improve.
Standards-based is really the only thing that challenges react these days, i.e. raw JS with es modules, web components, and no build step/bundling. It only works in certain situations though, but when it does work, it's so much better than the giant web of black boxes and indirection that is the React universe.
> Standards-based is really the only thing that challenges react these days
I feel like Vue would be a better fit for this role, especially since now they have a Composition API that's as pleasant to use as React, except that they do lifecycle hooks better than React (no messing about with dependency arrays): https://vuejs.org/guide/extras/composition-api-faq.html
There's also Pinia which is a lot simpler than trying to use Redux, it's closer to MobX: https://pinia.vuejs.org/
Seriously, the only actual complaint I have about Vue is that the 2 to 3 migration wasn't all that pleasant (albeit not as painful as what Python dealt with hah).
Oh and for more complex use cases (like what Next provides), there is Nuxt: https://nuxt.com/
Vue 3 is seriously an amazing piece of tech. Nuxt is going after the same DX of Next but without all of the big company IPO baggage behind it.
Vue also takes a lot of inspiration from compiler first frameworks and will be implementing an optional API to bring those optimizations to core in a coming point release.
I agree with you that hooks are a great feature that many React devs would probably enjoy using.
The only downside to Vue atm is the lacking comprehensive community support for libraries like `react-aria` and `framermotion`. I think the community is working on ports, but we all know that sometimes ports make compromises that might miss the nuance of the primary library author thinking about those problems directly in relation to the target client.
I like Vue as much as the next guy, but comparing Nuxt to Next doesn't really do Next justice. Nuxt is pretty much a glorified blog engine, a conceptually broken tech demo. Its performance is abysmal, the developer experience frustrating, and many things that seem convenient when you read the docs turn out to be a hassle in production.
This description of Nuxt 3 couldn't be further from reality. Performance is on par with anything else I've tried (SvelteKit, Remix, Next) and the DX (module ecosystem, layers, auto imports, vite, etc ) are actually what's made it my default.
Of course it could have been done without Svelte. Thats the only stack their team know and/or wanted to work with. Nothing wrong with that, but would be nice if they were more upfront about that instead of "impossible for a different solution to exist".
There was a psychological term for it, making a decision first and only then finding supportive arguments in favour of the decision?
I don’t hear any arguments against react here strong enough to justify not choosing VueJS or React.
It’s not in the interests of your client.