This mirrors my own experience with React. The core library itself is fine, and I love the way it bridges functional paradigms without forcing a ton of functional vocabulary on the team, but the ecosystem is a mess. And, because the React core is so minimal, eventually you need to interact with that ecosystem. JS dependency hell is real, and it's worse with React than any other framework that I've worked with.
I don't really understand what users are doing when they say things like this. What kind of features are you trying to implement?
As a React dev since 2015, things were pretty bad initially in this way - but now you can literally build complete applications with React, react-router-dom (clearly the winner in this regard), and your choice of state management (mobx 6 is, to me, the best). Redux is king and MobX is the slightly more adventurous challenger.
I have built an absolute plethora of applications and I do not have any external dependencies beyond those two, TypeScript, D3, and the occasional helper library (date formatting, deep-equals, etc).
Speaking to some other points as well, the React core is not really minimal at all anymore, since the advent of hooks you can actually completely bypass external state management and just use hooks and your own context. I've done this on a couple smaller applications lately and the hooks `useState` and `useEffect` are actually insanely powerful.
Last but not least, React has insanely strong error messages and linting warnings. Things like non-unique key errors, debug symbols knowing the actual source of errors, stack traces enumerating thru the actual React tree so you can see your error, dependency array validation for useEffect, and more that I can't recall at the moment - it's the top library for UI for a lot of reasons and I think your opinion sounds a few years old.
I think its still quite bad for debugging. I get a lot of "look here" for errors, but there are still times I set breakpoints on the internals to try and figure out what is going on. Usually in combination with some babel plugin messing things up, or some webpack caching issue, etc. I still think more could be done here, but adding the necessary debugging stuff would bloat the core.
> Redux is king
Redux is quickly going out of fashion. Interested to hear your thoughts on how long you think it will remain around though or evolve. When I look at redux-saga/redux-observable projects, its incredibly verbose for such simple things. And there seem like very simple solutions on the horizon with suspense resource fetching stuff.
> Usually in combination with some babel plugin messing things up
To be honest with you, you can't really blame React in this situation - it is nonetheless immensely frustrating to be sure.
> Redux is quickly going out of fashion
Yes, when I say it's "king" I only mean in terms of popularity within the community. I personally never understood the point of Redux and have always greatly preferred MobX for exactly what you say - it is far too verbose.
I also don't really have a good read on how the future of these projects will go - I would have thought MobX would've won out long ago. Maybe now with MobX 6 moving away from decorators it can gain the steam it deserves. I think the key blocker has been / is that MobX is building a runtime graph, and people don't understand graphs (let alone dependency graphs) very well, so it feels like magic. It's really easy to use though.
With features like Suspense, I feel like React will continue to push for more concise ways to write your components, but I also wonder if even the one level of misdirection that Suspense shows will be enough to limit its adoption. So far, explicit and non-magic seems to be a strange community preference
