I love this article and the pluralist worldview harking back to 2015/16. I'd love to tell my team "Hey we're going to build this small separate use case in Svelte". But the evaluation checklist, which is pretty accurate, is in direct opposition to the point being made.
Assess Performance Needs: 99% of apps are not going to notice the difference, so you choose React
Team Skills and Learning Curve: Everyone knows React, nobody knows Qwik, you choose React
Scaling and Cost of Ownership: Immaterial
Ecosystem Fit: React has the more full and stable ecosystem, you choose React
On top of all this, all the AI tools have good capability with React - defaulting to it themselves - and engineers are increasingly expected to make significant use of AI tooling.
Cheaper for sure but the underlying complexity is completely hidden on consoles. There are many justifications for why PCs "can be simple" if you just buy pre-built, but that only solves your problem for an unspecified amount of time.
With a console, you buy the latest one and play the games until there's a new one (in the case where money is no object). You never have to worry about settings or optimisation, it just works. You also know exactly when your hardware is out of date because there's a new generation console.
Personally I'm a PC gamer, I currently run an RTX 3070 and I still wonder whether my CPU or RAM are limiting performance because I'm not getting the performance I expected (but wasn't guaranteed by any single vendor for my custom build). This is a problem I can solve, but it would be worth it to me to pay someone else to deal with it because I just don't have the time/inclination.
> JS the language isn't great but it's JS the culture that is the real problem.
This is the money quote of the thread for me. From the perspective of someone whose main language has been JS or TS for about 8 years, it's getting worse since some of the biggest names in the discipline just seem to be people with large social followings giving terrible advice. This advice is then eaten up by hoardes of bootcamp alumni who have been given a loose understanding of React and unleashed on the world as "junior developers".
I don't know if there is a "main reason" for all instances. For me, on this kind of project at one of the Biggest Co's, it seemed a bit like the safety net point you make and it creeps into everything. There didn't seem to be much pressure because the project was never going to be pulled and had infinite money. This seemed to manifest in "good people" (my opinion) working at about 40% capacity and new hires having a background in companies more like BigCo than InternalStartup.
Edit: To clarify my last point, my assumption being that the point of InternalStartup was to allow deviating almost entirely from BigCo's approach to everything and that those people from OtherBigCo would be less likely to have that mindset.
Assess Performance Needs: 99% of apps are not going to notice the difference, so you choose React
Team Skills and Learning Curve: Everyone knows React, nobody knows Qwik, you choose React
Scaling and Cost of Ownership: Immaterial
Ecosystem Fit: React has the more full and stable ecosystem, you choose React
On top of all this, all the AI tools have good capability with React - defaulting to it themselves - and engineers are increasingly expected to make significant use of AI tooling.