Alex-C137

Which current trajectory are you referring to?

It's not vaguely adjacent, the actual foundations of that research were directly publicly funded and wouldn't be possible without it - the author is not talking about how their PageRank algorithm got funded nor money that Google received.

The foundations of it, yes: "all of these were publicly or quasi-publicly funded"

The author never claims otherwise?

Unfortunately that is also be par for the course

“They are so racialised. They should never even let those be published because it’s like the worst stereotypes about Africa, or India, or you name it,” said Alenichev.

This is a problem and always has been with AI, people have been saying this for at least a decade at this point. Type in "photorealistic picture of child in refugee camp" in any AI that lets you.

None of this refutes that fact that it was created and pushed by Meta nor explains why it remains popular when there are "better" alternatives by nearly any objective measurement. HTML template frameworks have gotten significantly better since your thesis over ten years ago, Vue.js being the primary one that quickly followed React less than a year after it came out. I also used backbone and knockout.js professionally and, while I agree I definitely prefer React over those, it doesn't explain why React remains popular.

I like to argue about it because I like knowing why people think the way they do about React. I'm a long-time React hater and still look for ways to change my mind, so there's a point for me I guess?

Hard disagree. React is only popular because large companies made it so. There are few things that React is inherently better than Vue and none of them are its bundle footprint, page load speeds, nor the average time to learn one or the other.

Subjectively I am extremely in opposition to the fact that XML anything with composable functions is more intuitive than HTML templates by any stretch of the imagination.

This is an extremely insane take and should be deleted immediately. Disgusting

I feel like React is more complicated these days for little gain. I've worked in Knockout.js, Aurelia, Svelte, Vue 2, Vue 3, and now React.js. To me, React.js was more complicated to learn than almost all of them (Knockout.js is older so that felt more complicated to me). My favorite was either Vue 2 or Svelte - they're just simple to learn.

In my opinion I feel like React.js was ahead of its time, but now we're seeing some competitors achieve the same (or better results in terms of benchmarks) with simpler approaches.

Keep in mind these are just opinions, and I'm only about a month into React in a massive web application. That said, it took me like a literal day to learn Vue 2 because it was mostly just like native web development anyways.