vietnameselady1's comments

My point is more that, while Dan A.'s chart does a good job of addressing individual parts of React Sadness, it is sort of moot, because those choices will already be made for me, wholesale, via tangential incentives and community mob rule, instead of consideration and consensus on a per-project basis.

It doesn't matter (for example) if I am/am not comfortable with ES2015 syntax. A junior developer already made that decision for me when he decided to implement the modal window by adding React, Babel, and Webpack to the project, instead of just writing a two-line event listener and a CSS class. Meanwhile, my colleagues are standing at the kegerator toasting his choice, because how could we ever have maintained or optimized such archaic vanilla JavaScript before without arrow functions and DOM diffing!?

React is not bad. In fact, it is great. But instead of being "an option" it is becoming "the default." Sadness results from being forced by industry trends into using it everywhere, despite knowing that it doesn't solve any problems that I did have while introducing new problems that I didn't have.

Although I like this a lot, and I think it addresses most individual nuggets of React Sadness in a pretty reasonable way, I am still sad.

I am sad because every process rectangle in this chart should also point to a decision diamond that says:

"Does it seem that the entire industry has migrated to this stack, whether or not it really makes sense for everyone to? That a feedback loop now influences shops to choose these tools/technologies not because they are called for, but simply because they are trendy? That present excitement outweighs the question of 'whether you need this or not' in the eyes of most of your peers and colleagues? That the incentive to not get left behind is stronger than the incentive to stop and consider?"

And then, that diamond should point to a final rectangle that says:

"If you wish to remain employable, learn React + Redux + ES2017 + Webpack now, or join a different sector of the industry. As for the sadness, deal with it."

This isn't only true of React, of course. The underlying sadness comes from watching one's valid hesitations drowned out by the mob.

I would like to see TED scale down and return to its simpler roots (pre 2007), possibly even go dark and spend a few years finding itself. The brilliance of the older TED formula was that it was chaotic and amusingly unpolished: The audio was bad. The lighting was crap. The emcee was awkward. But that TED limelight could bring out unexpected genius moments from humble unknowns, and elicit real humility from the odd celebrity who might give a talk. "Put interesting people together," the rule was, "let a few of them talk, and see what happens."

Today TED is all polish and perfectionism and production value. The Academy Awards stage design and videography is planned months in advance. Speakers are carefully vetted, recalibrated, tweaked, and tuned among an upper tier committee. Corporate sponsors are courted by a large international sales team, and these accounts pay enormous sums for the chance to create branded "experiences" for the ticket holders. Speakers (those whose egos allow it) are coached relentlessly about storytelling, sincerity, posture...

These efforts may have increased the average-overall quality of the talks, and made the talks more palatable to a wide audience. But that came at an expense of a certain kind of magic.