[doctorOb]

A number of years ago, I was conducting an interview for a front end developer position. I started with a mostly algorithmic question hoping to gauge the candidate's comfortability with javascript. It was something like “use a for loop and manipulate an array”. They froze up and asked: “can I use jQuery?”. At that point jQuery was at peak ubiquity. Here we had someone reaching for it when the DOM wasn’t even on the table.

I think we’re at that point with React today. It’s become the de-facto way to make a web page, oftentimes for the better. People use it on their complex sites so even for a simple landing page, it’s often the most comfortable tool to work with, despite the fact that it’s adding unnecessary complexity. Fortunately for the user, most of that complexity can be absorbed at build time using server side rendering (the client doesn’t even need to have react if the site is truly static).

It doesn’t matter that you have now moved your HTML into a transpiled javascript syntax that spits out a chain of javascript function calls which generates a javascript object that is then fed into a javascript library that builds an internalized DOM representation and, finally, translates _that_ into an HTML string (which, btw, is happening on a javascript powered server). The browser sees the same HTML + CSS that it might have seen if you had just served them a hand written HTML file over Apache.

For some devs, KISS might actually yield an incredibly complex blob of javascript ecosystem goodies, that is at the same time simpler to setup and get started with than remembering how to structure an HTML file ;)