Someone already linked Notion.so and you didn't seem to find it complex enough?
The reality is there's a continuum between what is fluff and what is providing value you don't see.
I agree a lot of web development ceremony is misguided and of dubious benefit, but you're seemingly against even basic state propagation.
But you also seem biased in thinking of systems where you can hold the whole thing in your head.
When a site like Facebook shows you a chat message, there are is the an iceberg of functionality that you don't see and can't imagine with that bias.
You think "I'd just use JS and add a div styled like X", and Facebook probably has more JS to enable defining what X looks like because that div can have anything from a text message, to a video, to a chess move from a FB game, than you can picture for an entire site.
The analytics and tapbacks and a million little features that would make for hundreds of listeners on some seemingly simple component
—
At the end of the day not everyone is making Facebook, so I agree people are complicating things for dubious benefit, but not so much that basic React is problematic: even for small applications it's a cheap way to support the "combinatorial explosion of edge cases" problem of product development.
You add one edge case to a state change you wired with plain JS and things are fine. But then you add an edge case to that edge case, and so on, and eventually you'll either just have a worse version of what React offers, or an unapproachable mess of code.
The reality is there's a continuum between what is fluff and what is providing value you don't see.
I agree a lot of web development ceremony is misguided and of dubious benefit, but you're seemingly against even basic state propagation.
But you also seem biased in thinking of systems where you can hold the whole thing in your head.
When a site like Facebook shows you a chat message, there are is the an iceberg of functionality that you don't see and can't imagine with that bias.
You think "I'd just use JS and add a div styled like X", and Facebook probably has more JS to enable defining what X looks like because that div can have anything from a text message, to a video, to a chess move from a FB game, than you can picture for an entire site.
The analytics and tapbacks and a million little features that would make for hundreds of listeners on some seemingly simple component
—
At the end of the day not everyone is making Facebook, so I agree people are complicating things for dubious benefit, but not so much that basic React is problematic: even for small applications it's a cheap way to support the "combinatorial explosion of edge cases" problem of product development.
You add one edge case to a state change you wired with plain JS and things are fine. But then you add an edge case to that edge case, and so on, and eventually you'll either just have a worse version of what React offers, or an unapproachable mess of code.