TechTakes

you know, for as much poison’s been poured into my ear about how everything must be Amazon scale, there’s no way in fuck they use react for their storefront or AWS, is there? I think the only reason react is considered an Amazon-scale frontend (besides Facebook, which also has a shitty UI, though not as bad as Amazon, and notoriously uses PHP for everything) is how hard they push it as part of AWS Amplify, a toolchain they say will help you reach their scale (but from experience: it absolutely will not, it’s just a set of technologies that increase your AWS bill and perform like shit, which is why Amazon doesn’t use it for anything of value themselves)

the only case I can immediately think of of a very major site going from server rendering to react is GitHub (which used to use Ruby on Rails and Erlang, apparently) and it’s been an unmitigated disaster — none of the new features that supposedly require react are good, the performance fucking sucks now, and the thing keeps breaking (I get weird renders with broken styling every few refreshes and apparently I’m not the only one). the fucking thing even hijacks the keyboard shortcuts I use and has become an accessibility nightmare, all in the name of pointlessly turning it into a react SPA and vscode wannabe.