Ask HN: Why is React + Next.js so popular?
I'm about to start a side project that requires a frontend. First things first, I did some research on which framework to use. The obvious ones are React, Angular and Vue. After doing some research using Google (Blogs, Trends, NPM Stats etc.) and my favorite AI companion, I developed a sympathy towards Vue. I'm not exactly sure why. While researching I installed a browser extension to view the technologies used on a website. Whenever I visited a website that I liked (anthropic, openai, linear, notion), I checked what they were using. And this is what brings me to this question: most use React and Next.js. For a side project it's probably not important whether I use Vue or React and I should go with whatever I feel comfortable with but I was wondering why so many (popular) companies choose React + Next. Is it mostly about the ecosystem and community or is there more to it that I'm missing that makes React the obvious choice? In short: inflated tech stacks, "quick and dirty" solutions, and too many inexperienced decision maker on the market Longer:
React became standard because people with actual no frontend knowledge (and taste) wanted to have building blocks, doesn't matter how bad, ugly and slow it is. Next.js is hyped, because it does many things quickly (and dirty), a low learning curve. It does what PHP did 10+ years ago, and since so many new devs are in the market, for them, this is a new thing (you know, every joke is new for a new born...). Next.js is pretty much just used as a baseline to load shadcn blocks/components, have a routing that does not require a backend, then push everything to be static (No, I won't mention that, if you can write decent vanilla JS code, how much faster, safer, efficient code you can write instead of that monstrocity). How many bad startup companies are on the market (3-8-year-old companies that still state it is a startups and still looking for funding, without an actual user base) they tend to have "opinionated" leaders who basically have always some friend who recommend things that is pretty much just hype-train decision without actual experience or understanding the consequences. Many companies burn hundreds if not thousands of dollars on infrastructure to fire up Next.js. And if you check all the features that are stated for it and compare it with 5-10 years old PHP solutions, you will realize, you can run the same product on a monthly 5 dollar vps too... (unpopular truth) Not sure how exactly React became so standard, but I'd assume it was a combination of the backing of Facebook and the frustration with performance and developer UX of Angular, which was most popular at that time. In our case, we had started a large project with Vue because most of our small team was familiar with it, but our tech lead decided to pivot to React because we had so much trouble hiring for Vue development in our city. > Not sure how exactly React became so standard, but I'd assume it was a combination of the backing of Facebook and the frustration with performance and developer UX of Angular, which was most popular at that time. I believe React became so standard because it provides the right abstraction for managing GUIs expressed as a tree of compostable UI components and controls that are automatically updated when it's underlying view model is updated. It's approach is so well-suited to the problem domain. I frankly do not understand why Next.js managed to get any traction at all. I dare say that it was kind of forced upon the whole world with create-react-app dropping out of favour and newbies looking to quickly create barebones React projects. "Compostable" is correct :D React is what happens when you misunderstand the purpose (and principle) of web components, then double-down and encourage framework-related libraries to sprout up around it. React is what gets used by companies who didn't do enough due diligence into deciding on the best tools for the job. I've worked with React and find it endlessly annoying and arbitrarily designed for the most part (in a modern development context - probably it didn't seem so randomly assembled back when it was still relatively new). Composable components and automatic updates were not new to React though. I guess maybe the way it did it was better than previous frameworks, using the shadow DOM and stuff IIRC, Next.js became popular because it made SSR fairly easy, and Vite wasn't as much of a standard as it is today.
React at this point is the standard for frontends, if you're not using templates.