I'm sorry, but what does poorly implemented responsive design have to with React? I agree with you that most websites are very poorly made, but that's not React's fault (as much as it is being constantly shitted on here on HN, which I really don't like), only developers' (and their managers'). Please stop blaming frameworks.
I don't blame React per say. But with the proliferation of this technology I've noticed lots of things broken (links, history navigation, layout) that render a lot of things unusable to me and unfortunately I see very few upsides. I'm even willing to admit that React and SPAs are a great technology that enables some (few) use cases that were cumbersome before. But, it clearly seems rushed and applied everywhere with no discernable thought.
React was created because we wanted to have more complex web apps. That brings more complexity in development. Empirically, clearly we now see everywhere that most companies don't want to pay for the best version of their websites they can have.
I agree and part of that was delivered, I mentioned earlier that for some use cases SPA tech couldn't be better (well, it could and it keeps on improving and i'm in for it). But it seems that it washed away with good practices, with things that used to work and are utterly broken. Again, Im not blaming React, I just can't help but notice that the brokenness started around the same time React was adopted en masse.
React is great for what it does. But people also wants it where it does not fit (where server-rendered html is enough with vanilla JS). And then they go on to re-implement half the browser features. Badly.
I completely agree with this. Management is usually under a lot of pressure to add new features or fix bugs from the previous release that was also rushed. This has a compounding effect on technical debt.
The pace and scale of application development is also not at all comparable to the past. The level of involvement management has in app dev is much higher and there are more technical contributors who are less coordinated. This leads to a lot of "good enough" thinking instead of paying attention to details.
This is especially true for products and especially at startups. Less so for services at big orgs. Services tend to have a longer lifecycle. Services are usually B2B and the public never sees those UIs.
Maybe not React itself, but the UI frameworks that draw devs to the frameworks, yes. Frameworks like that offer the promise of responsive design to developers without actually helping them understanding how it works, and as a result often fail to deliver on that promise. Splitting everything into 12 grid columns often just hides the actual work that needs to be done. Plain HTML is fully responsive by default, almost all framework components are less-so.
It's true that React almost certainly wouldn't be responsible for what sounds like a blatant layout bug on a narrow smartphone viewport. React has almost no opinions on things like web page layout or touch interactions. I have to imagine the commenter invoked "React" as a sort of scapegoat for the prevalence of low-quality web pages.
