I might not be able to tell if it's using React specifically, but I can tell it's using a React-like framework trivially because it feels like the entire website is covered in glue
No. You are just dealing with bad code. There are highly performant web apps written in React. It's all about craftsmanship. React gives you many tools to skip unnecessary work and reduce latency, such as shouldComponentUpdate, and assigning keys to elements in a collection. Or architectural decisions like splitting your UI into components correctly. It's up to the individual developers to use them. Bad developers write bad code in any framework.
But one thing I've noticed is that because frontend code runs on users' computers, fewer businesses and engineers have the incentive to really optimize that performance. If one writes bad backend code, it shows up as increased AWS bill; if one writes bad frontend code, well the cost is diffuse and many don't notice it.
> No. You are just dealing with bad code. There are highly performant web apps written in React.
cool maybe I'll see one one day
> React gives you many tools to skip unnecessary work and reduce latency, such as shouldComponentUpdate, and assigning keys to elements in a collection
but do people use these outside of demos
I have an high end CPU with 32GB of RAM and almost every single website I use gives me a worse experience than I got 20 years ago
> if one writes bad frontend code, well the cost is diffuse and many don't notice it.
exactly, and that's why we are where we are today - surrounded on all sides by websites covered in glue, because bad experience has been completely normalised, all for what? Some abstract notion of developer convenience that results in almost every case in a significantly worse experience by almost any metric.
