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I’ve talked about React in the past, and I’m bringing it back up again. React's popularity is an issue I’ve brought up with several other points, but I want to focus on the overhyped nature of React specifically. I want to talk about how React got to be overhyped, what keeps it that way, and why that’s such a bad thing. Ultimately, React’s inflated popularity is hurting a lot of front-end developers and companies using it.
The Numbers
Let’s have a peek at the numbers. I looked at the Stack Overflow trends for React, Angular, and Vue. The trend graph basically looks at the number of questions asked about each technology through time. We can see that React questions really picked up over 2015–2016, and it hasn’t slowed down much since. On the other hand, we can see that Angular has a giant spike and then taper off. With Vue, we can see that it always has lower numbers than Angular and React and doesn’t have as large of a rise. Keep in mind that this is the number of questions being asked about a certain technology. This is an important distinction that will come into play later.
How React got Overhyped
The first and most crucial reason React has the hype is that Facebook created and promoted it. Let’s not underestimate the kind of reach Facebook has when promoting things that they make. Right away, we can see that it started with inflated popularity because it came from Facebook, and they’re promoting React. That’s not to say that React is completely undeserving of being popular but that it started being artificially popular. If Any other company or individual had released react, I would argue that it would not have caught traction, and it certainly wouldn’t be where it is today.
What Keeps React Popular
React was released in 2013, and it’s still the most popular JavaScript library in use today. We know that it started popularly, but what keeps it popular? Well, the field of software development has grown considerably since 2013. One facet of React is that you don’t really have to know much more than some basic JavaScript to get started with it. Its…
