[pimterry]

Totally agree. Chiming in as another React dev: I really regret the last few years of choices React has made. I don't want a React-integrated BFF layer, even on greenfield projects, hooks are awful and the whole thing just gets more awkward to solve tangentially related problems.

I really do want a good frontend framework that lets me expressively build and render dynamic frontend components, but it feels like 99% of React's development in the last few years has been just been creating churn and making that core frontend experience worse and worse. Hooks solve challenges around sharing component meta-functionality but then end up far worse for all other non-trivial cases, and it seems like RSC & concurrency just break things and add constraints instead of improving any part of my existing experience.

I guess this is cool if you're building mega-projects, but it makes React actively painful to use for anything smaller. I still use it every day, but as soon as I find a good off-ramp for my product (something similar, but simpler) I will take it. Moving towards Preact & signals currently seems like the best option for existing projects so far as I can tell.