> The issue is that these huge frameworks have made the web a horrible slow mess. I deal as DevOps/SRE daily with these services, and finding one that will do a first load under 10s is close to impossible.
If you make a React page you will see that it is absolutely instant to do things. React isn't a huge framework. It's a very fast library. Even if you add in all the extras such as routing, it's all instant. It's almost jarring how instant it is.
A dashboard taking ages to load isn't going to be React.
"Instant" can mean different things to different people.
I have an HTMX/Flask/Bootstrap app that feels instant for most requests on the LAN, except when it doesn't.
Often React apps are pretty snappy, but if you want to do complex data validation on controlled forms, where the state updates for every keystroke, it can drag you down. There are good frameworks for doing uncontrolled forms in a disciplined way
but it's another thing to add to your bundle. React is also not fast enough to do animations so you have a lot of .show/.hide (or display: none) CSS has facilities to do transitions and animations that are pretty good but I always find it a little nervewracking for a JS application to have state in React state variables and any other kind of state. Some ImGUI frameworks have components that look superficially like React components but are fast enough to animate every frame, which makes me feel like I am in control and get the animation to look exactly what I want.
> I always find it a little nervewracking for a JS application to have state in React state variables and any other kind of state. Some ImGUI frameworks have components that look superficially like React components but are fast enough to animate every frame, which makes me feel like I am in control and get the animation to look exactly what I want
I know what you mean there. I had the same feeling back when I was doing frontend things.