React itself is a view library with a very small learning curve and narrow API. You can view all the documentation on their website. It's about 5 pages. This has nothing to do with Facebook's scale and Facebook didn't design this complexity.

Webpack isn't React, Redux isn't React, ES2015 isn't React. They're commonly used with React and add complexity to both your architecture and build step, but you're not required to use them.

This tutorial is getting a lot of negative replies because it's a tutorial on all those other things in addition to React. It takes 90 pages before you write React code because the author spent a lot of it explaining how Webpack configurations work.

Are you trying to say that if you are building a simple web app you should be building a server-side rendered web app using Rails/Phoenix?

What's wrong with react? If it's good enough for facebook and good enough for the hundreds of other high traffic sites, then it's good enough for me.

Of course I also like to stay employed and react is the most in demand framework right now.

Sorry, I should have been more clear. What I meant was that your web app will never be as complex and resource demanding as Facebook. The reason why React is so complex is because it's intended for complex systems. If you want to quickly build a one off web app you shouldn't be using React imo. The length and complexity of this tutorial is a testament to that.

React is simple, not complex. Simplicity is like the main benefit of using React if your intention is to build a single page app. If that's not what you need, then yeah, use Rails.

Vacuum React is all you need for a small scale, real world app.

Ok, granted at some point you might want to pass your build through Browserify and Babel. No worries, both of those things are one liners in bash.

On the other hand, if you spend most of your time trying to make your build process the holy grail of hot-reloading webpack ES2020 isomorphic madness then you're not going to get much real work done. No one told you to do that though, and you can't blame React either. But even that isn't complexity. It's just annoying setup stuff. Real complexity grows with the scope of your app.

I disagree. React it's self is very simple. It's web development that is complicated. Other frameworks that try to do everything like angular are also complicated for the developers. The frameworks that do everything and are easy to use (like meteor) don't offer the extensibility of the more bare bones frameworks. Any web site that wants to grow needs a full control of the stack.

Of course, if all you're building is a static web page then I can see just using some HTML and CSS. But if you want to work professionally as a web developer then you need to know javascript and at least one major framework. You can not stay employed as a "full stack dev" if all you do is write an a couple HTML and CSS files and serve them with python httpSimpleServer.

React is complex because there are realms of new things you can do with it that you couldnt do before in a web app, and the best version hasnt been found yet.

React is just for view layer. Its not much complex. Its simple enough to add to normal pages let alone SPA.