Heather BuchelI try to not be too grumpy about new tech or framework decisions (or old tech that's being rebranded as new!) because sometimes IT IS just because I don't have the bandwidth to keep up on everything but I'm just so tired of React. I don't want to use server actions. I don't want to use RSC. I want to do anything else. Please, very few are going to use these well. I don't feel like we advanced at all from the days of spaghetti code that people tried to convince us we were saved from with React.
"Don't you remember how awful it is having jQuery slung every where and trying to keep everything in sync and the mess of code it created?" YEAH HAVE YOU SEEN WHAT PEOPLE ARE DOING NOW? LMAO please.
If I think back to like, 10 years ago, the progression in the world of CSS has DRASTICALLY changed the way I build a UI for a website as a huge net positive good. Less code. Less images. Less clunky weird code. I really do not feel the same way about the advancements in JS UI libraries. I really don't think there has been a net positive good. Drastically different? Yeah, sure. But drastically BETTER? No, I don't think so.
sara the ninth 💀@hbuchel I definitely agree with you, I find myself still wondering if we shouldn’t have abandoned JS entirely and moved toward a new web-centric programming language tied to CSS and HTML in a more balanced fashion. And that even Web Components relying on JS in their spec is a terrible sin we shouldn’t be forgiven for.
React has been as much an eraser of sensible solutions and implementations as it has been a powerful tool from FB to reshape the web’s collective health. 
Torb@sara I think it’s more about the mindset than anything else. JS can run on the server and spit out HTML after all, as thankfully is increasingly becoming standard feature on many metaframeworks now. We just need a culture of web dev that actually consistently uses it.
You can use other languages than JS of course, but I still think that mindset is the key, not which language you use to generate the HTML.
@torb that’s completely fair, I think maybe I’m struggling trying to communicate that some of the mindset comes from a language, and how it’s packaged, built, etc.? And while HTML & CSS have been built with this interwoven dance? JS has evolved into something that’s not built or stewarded the same way? JS should be planning and building with how HTML & CSS proceed, but it seems to be progressing as a language on its own, that happens to run in web contexts. Does that make sense?
@sara I think a lot maybe comes from the tooling of how the language is used? I get your point though! The transpilers, compilers, babel and so on. Granted, I think tooling of programming languages is a sore point in general.
They’re often very complicated. JS used to be different (and still can be)…
The JS of yore which was more vanilla JS file you just stuck somewhere and linked to in HTML. No preprocessing needed! No node build step! I think that yielded a different culture. This is still possible of course!
I think we’re starting to maybe see a shift though. Rich of Svelte will for the upcoming version use plan JS (switching away from TypeScript) specifically to avoid compiling JS and being closer to the spirit of the web for example.