In practice, the only thing that makes web experiences good is caring about the user experience — specifically, the experience of folks at the margins. Technologies come and go, but what always makes the difference is giving a toss about the user.

React dot JS, or simply “reaked”, is a not inconsiderable amount of JavaScript, written by some self-styled engineers, to help a website called Facebook undermine democracy, foment genocide, and do whatever else is needed to sell virtual advertising space…

React is useful for making complex interfaces like Facebook’s or for making otherwise simple interfaces, and their underlying codebases, complex like Facebook’s. Rendering the text “hello world” without React requires one text editor and exactly 11 bytes of code. Doing the same with React, via the popular “create-react-app” command line interface, requires over 200MB of Node modules. The continual maintenance and expert calibration needed to run a React application has created a thriving job market.