Readit NewsSince moving to california, I did find some up around the mountains of the bay area (including a 7 leaf clover), but not many elsewhere in town.
In southern california I haven't found one yet.
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The "paleo influencer" comparison is interesting, but I think it actually works both ways here.
Yes, there's a temptation to romanticize the past and dismiss modern tools. But there's an equally strong tendency to assume that newer, more popular, and more widely-adopted automatically means better. React didn't just win on pure technical merit. It has Facebook's marketing muscle behind it, it became a hiring checkbox, and it created a self-reinforcing ecosystem where everyone learns it because everyone uses it.
The article isn't suggesting that a "huge global collective of the world's most talented engineers have been conned." It's asking a much more nuanced question: did all that effort actually move us forward, or did we just move sideways into different complexity?
Look at the two implementations in the article. They do the same thing. They're roughly the same length. After 15 years of React development, countless developer hours, and a massive ecosystem, we're not writing dramatically less code or solving the problem more elegantly. We're just solving it differently, with different tradeoffs.
Sometimes looking backward isn't about being a "retro-idealist," it's about questioning whether we added complexity without proportional benefit. The paleo diet people might be onto something when they point out that we over-engineered our food. Maybe we over-engineered our frameworks too.
But they arent the same, the backbone code has raw HTML strings. These are opaque for code editors and not type safe. React code is using typed objects to construct the html (if you used typescript like is standard in 2025 for react projects). The backbone app is disconnected in the rendering flow. the space-y-2 selector is ambiguous and causes unnecessary searching. Just in this small example adds a level of indirection that just adds noise to what the component does. With everything setting raw html, what if you wanted the requirements blob to be a seperate component for instance. this is super easy and clean in react because html and custom components are treated the same.
It also cherry picks an extremely narrow use case of a single element on the page of a password element. This hides the realities of mature apps that you then need another parent component to check if the confirm password field matches, submits the form to backend and displays errors, checks if username is taken etc. Your example doesnt show calling another component from inside a component, etc.
Your purposefully slicing it in to a narrow use case and trying to show equivalence where there isn't
This is the equivalent of those "Primitive Technologies" Youtube videos of building a swimming pool out of mud. Yeah sure technically you accomplished some definition of a "swimming pool". Yes, in some lens you can stand back and look at your pool and a inground pool with filtration, etc and say that you accomplished the same. Yes, technically you proved if you want a swimming pool you don't need a bunch of other equipment. But if you are building a swimming pool to last and be usable for the next 10 years, you will find out why modern pools are not a dug out hole filled with muddy water.
That’s not to say popularity guarantees quality, that progress is always positive, or that there’s not plenty to criticise. But I do think authors of articles like this sometimes get a big hit from being subversive by playing into retro-idealist tropes. The engineering equivalent of paleo influencers.
Such proposals would suggest a huge global collective of the world’s most talented engineers have been conned into fundamentally bad tech, which is a little amusing.
When people throw around words like "foolishness" to describe tools that millions of professionals use, its hard to take the rest of their comment seriously. It radiates a special blend of arrogance and ignorance.
Whether React is good or bad, there is a reason people use it. Outright dismissing it entirely seems a bit like chestertons fence.
Is it a gold rush? Absolutely. There is a massive FOMO and everyone is rushing to claim some land, while the biggest profiteers of all are ones selling the shovels and pick axes. It's all going to wash out and in the end a very small number of players will be making money, while everyone else goes bust.
While many people think the broadly described AI is overhyped, I think people are grossly underestimating how much this changes almost everything. Very few industries will be untouched.