React Server Components: A Bad Idea?
<inhales> It has been more than 4 years since I started Web Dev and to this React was a very specific “ick” for me, everything about it felt… Off in some way, and this was before me discovering Preact, Solid, Vue, many more frameworks, and how cleaner their patterns were. Signals, SFCs, and many other things were one of the several things which set them apart as “React Alternatives”, and really good ones, so much so I could probably devolve this article into why you should stop using React as a whole, and maybe I will. As of Recent, but by recent I mean like, maybe 2-3~ years??? React has focused an emphasis on what they dub “React Server Components”, now, on first thought you may have the following responses:
If you thought any of that, and are sane, you’d very disappointed to hear that React just threw away everything that made it decent, and just took the worst ways of going about creating “Server Components”, and essentially, reinvented PHP but even more bare bones. What do I mean by this? To answer that question, it runs very deep. Today, I read an article from some idiot on why you should start using “Server Components” in all your projects and reading it really cemented in how asinine the crowd it is for, and the technology itself is. If you are interested in reading that original bit, it’s linked here. But I suppose we really need to get into the knitty-gritty of this thing from the start, well supposedly explaining where my hatred for a lot of things stem from.
It was 2011, Angular.js and Backbone were still relatively fresh at the time, but Facebook was cooking up their own alternative internally for their own usage, they probably didn’t predicate how their little project would impact a good chunk of web development history going forward. Don’t remember if React (as in the JavaScript Library) or React Native was the internal result of a hackathon, but one of them was. React was initially presented as a “lighter” approach of client-side reactive UI components. At the time, it really was, a lot of people using Angular.JS (not to be confused with Angular) really did say and confirm that React felt a lot faster. But there was a catch, no one really wanted to write nested function calls, no, that looked way too hideous to deal with, except some people thought the imperative function calls were “good” and dissented JSX like the plague.
