> unless what web devs had before was really that horrible
As a big fan of react, I think that this isn't really a fair thing to say. I feel as though this statement implies that front end dev is not complex and therefore it surprises you that there is room for significant improvement. I'm sure that's not what you were thinking, but really, building complex imperative UIs with state can be very difficult, and react does represent a new step in the paradigm shift away from imperative development. Whether React is the future or not, components and composition are here to stay, and I think a increasingly large portion of the community is interested in writing web applications with immutability--all of which suites flux (and react) very well, and does not suite jquery very well.
React doesn't enable anything that you simply couldn't do with jquery and backbone, but it does make a lot of it way easier and reduces overall complexity by a ton, especially if you're developing with component structure and immutability in mind.
As a big fan of react, I think that this isn't really a fair thing to say. I feel as though this statement implies that front end dev is not complex and therefore it surprises you that there is room for significant improvement. I'm sure that's not what you were thinking, but really, building complex imperative UIs with state can be very difficult, and react does represent a new step in the paradigm shift away from imperative development. Whether React is the future or not, components and composition are here to stay, and I think a increasingly large portion of the community is interested in writing web applications with immutability--all of which suites flux (and react) very well, and does not suite jquery very well.
React doesn't enable anything that you simply couldn't do with jquery and backbone, but it does make a lot of it way easier and reduces overall complexity by a ton, especially if you're developing with component structure and immutability in mind.