I'm in an organization which had some extremely old, all-server-side-PHP tools.
We managed to get one section of them retooled as responsive HTML/PHP design, and then went whole hog on React.
Every single piece we replace with React seems slower and more complex. Tools that were "render it on the server as a finished page" has been replaced with "do it as an API that returns a ball of JSON and the client will render it." Most of these tasks are classic CRUD. So in the old version, you'd click a button or link and the page would reload in 5 seconds. Now, it lets you stare at a spinner for 10 seconds while it repopulates the same page. But golly, we avoided that flash of blank screen!
We were sold that splitting off an API would allow alternate implementation-- power users could bypass the UI and build their own automations. Nobody has; I don't think the API even firmed enough to be worth documenting.
I think the thing I resent most, though, is the tendency of modern Javascript to be a fantasy language. It does not exist in the wild. It's not like you can even say "here's a cool trick that works in Mozilla but not IE6" like back in the old days, it's literally zero-real-browser support. You instead need to set up an entire dev toolchain of stuff like Babel and Webpack before you can even get to Hello World. This seems like such a loss, given that the web was such an accessible platform-- get your $2 per month shared hosting, start writing a single file in PHP or raw HTML, and you can actually see useful stuff on your screen.
We managed to get one section of them retooled as responsive HTML/PHP design, and then went whole hog on React.
Every single piece we replace with React seems slower and more complex. Tools that were "render it on the server as a finished page" has been replaced with "do it as an API that returns a ball of JSON and the client will render it." Most of these tasks are classic CRUD. So in the old version, you'd click a button or link and the page would reload in 5 seconds. Now, it lets you stare at a spinner for 10 seconds while it repopulates the same page. But golly, we avoided that flash of blank screen!
We were sold that splitting off an API would allow alternate implementation-- power users could bypass the UI and build their own automations. Nobody has; I don't think the API even firmed enough to be worth documenting.
I think the thing I resent most, though, is the tendency of modern Javascript to be a fantasy language. It does not exist in the wild. It's not like you can even say "here's a cool trick that works in Mozilla but not IE6" like back in the old days, it's literally zero-real-browser support. You instead need to set up an entire dev toolchain of stuff like Babel and Webpack before you can even get to Hello World. This seems like such a loss, given that the web was such an accessible platform-- get your $2 per month shared hosting, start writing a single file in PHP or raw HTML, and you can actually see useful stuff on your screen.