Stability is not just about backward-compatibility; it also means promoting concepts/idioms which are consistent and long-lived. Django has been around for about 3 times as long as React, but has not undergone the same amount of churn that React has. If someone wrote React code in 2016 and left the scene for a couple of years, can they come back and build new React projects without significant re-training?
Regarding Django templates, I know how they work, but actually prefer building an API with Django, and connecting to that with an SPA (preferably one built with Ember since, as you can probably tell, I prefer batteries-included frameworks).
I'm really not as anti-JS as you inferred from my initial post (or as I unintentionally implied), but saying the ecosystem is not problematic makes it harder for it to get better.
> can they come back and build new React projects without significant re-training?
Absolutely. For one, React introduced a few primary concepts: components, JSX, and the component lifecycle. Whether you wrote functional components, class components, or moved to the new hooks-based components, these lifecycles are behaving the same. The way you write the lifecycle hook might be slightly different in a hooks world but it still exists the same. JSX is almost entirely unchanged in my experience. Composability and other techniques to pass data or context thru to the children still work the same as ever. Accessing DOM nodes still works the same as previously but with a new method as well.
In general, "the old way works but there's a new way too" sums up a lot of the core features. The library has updated and refined itself, but maintained back-compat with almost all old ways of using it, and conceptually stayed true.
Regarding Django templates, I know how they work, but actually prefer building an API with Django, and connecting to that with an SPA (preferably one built with Ember since, as you can probably tell, I prefer batteries-included frameworks).
I'm really not as anti-JS as you inferred from my initial post (or as I unintentionally implied), but saying the ecosystem is not problematic makes it harder for it to get better.