I totally agree - the example they give doesn't really need react OR backbone. You could just as easily show vanilla js as the 3rd example and wonder why you would ever even need a framework.
One off it seems fine, but a huge backbone app gets really complicated for me. Show me a huge react app vs a huge backbone app and I will understand the react much more quickly.
"It's verbose, sure, but there's no mystery. A junior developer can trace exactly what happens and when. The mental model is straightforward: "when this happens, do this."
I don't think that's true. A large backbone app has a lot of code that you'll have to trace through multiple files in different directories - the template are here, the functions are there but the endpoints are over there and... maybe it's just the backbone app I have to update but it's much more confusing and abstracted than the react app I also have to update. And don't even get me started with adding a new component. I can drop a new component into the react app and import it anywhere and it's super fast and easy... backbone not so much.
> I don't think that's true. A large backbone app has a lot of code that you'll have to trace through multiple files in different directories
This is exactly my experience with large scale Backbone apps (from 10+ years ago). Even with extras like Marionette it quickly became a complete nightmare to navigate or maintain. Zombie model and view objects leaking memory was almost inescapable.
I remember in 2013 I introduced Backbone to my current company, hoping to make sense out of our existing jQuery + ASP.Net MVC application. After ~3 months of code from junior and mid level developers (in house and off shore) I began to deeply regret my decision. There was just not enough patterns and utilities in the framework to keep things from going off the rails. We eventually shifted to Angular v1 and it was glorious, things just worked and even the ceremony I needed to add felt worth the trouble for the speed of development we gained.
Angular v1 was absolutely the game-changer for sane UI patterns. Although it could choke on large datasets and models were iffy, it allowed us to worry less about the framework and more about the work at hand.
