Can you give an example of a "sufficiently complex frontend" which is not behind a login wall, so we can actually all look at and discuss it?

Someone already linked Notion.so and you didn't seem to find it complex enough?

The reality is there's a continuum between what is fluff and what is providing value you don't see.

I agree a lot of web development ceremony is misguided and of dubious benefit, but you're seemingly against even basic state propagation.

But you also seem biased in thinking of systems where you can hold the whole thing in your head.

When a site like Facebook shows you a chat message, there are is the an iceberg of functionality that you don't see and can't imagine with that bias.

You think "I'd just use JS and add a div styled like X", and Facebook probably has more JS to enable defining what X looks like because that div can have anything from a text message, to a video, to a chess move from a FB game, than you can picture for an entire site.

The analytics and tapbacks and a million little features that would make for hundreds of listeners on some seemingly simple component

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At the end of the day not everyone is making Facebook, so I agree people are complicating things for dubious benefit, but not so much that basic React is problematic: even for small applications it's a cheap way to support the "combinatorial explosion of edge cases" problem of product development.

You add one edge case to a state change you wired with plain JS and things are fine. But then you add an edge case to that edge case, and so on, and eventually you'll either just have a worse version of what React offers, or an unapproachable mess of code.

Notion is behind a login.

So not easy for everybody here to look at and discuss.

If there is not a single public website out there which benefits from frontend frameworks with data-biding components, that probably tells us something.

You're not familiar with Facebook? Google Docs?

I mean it does tell us something they have logins: it's expensive to build complex single page applications

There's no incentive to do that for free and in the open.

I started my comment by explaining why you're not going to find the golden case you're digging for: even when provided you'll haughtily share how jQuery could do everything shown, and as I explained you don't see most of what is being done.

Everything is easy until it's not. Maybe you should share examples of things you worked on with a larger team and show us that we're overestimating the limitations of manual state updates.

That's an interesting position. Could you explain in more detail what you mean? What is the correlation? Asking without sarcasm.

The open web is enormous. Billions of pages.

If in this gigantic sample of websites, not a single one benefits from the techniques which people here describe as essential to build complex UIs - that would tell us that this is either false or that there are not complex UIs on the open web. The latter being unlikely, given the size and variety of sites out there.

Your logic doesn't track.

"

If a V12 is so powerful, show me an economy car with a V12.

If in all of the economy cars in existence, none has a V12, then either it's a false statement, or there are not V12s in economy cars. The latter being unlikely, given the size of the economy car market and the variety of models out there

"