I broadly agree, but I've never found a tool that is as good at simply generating HTML as front-end React.
* Modularisation is really easy. Components are ultimately just functions, with all the benefits for splitting up and deduplicating code that that brings. You don't need to create files to split up code units, which makes it a lot easier to create smaller, more flexible units.
* You're writing templates in a real programming language, ideally one you already know. Yes, there's a bit of syntax sugar with JSX, although in principle you don't need it, but everything else is just javascript. For example, things like importing other files just works - there's no special "partials" directory, and you don't need to figure out how this templating library approaches paths.
* You can manage your CSS much more easily with tools like CSS-in-JS or CSS Modules. Your styles are scoped to your components, which means that dead styles are much easier to find and remove, and you're less likely to have "action at a distance" issues from unexpected rules applying in places you don't expect.
* You have access to a lot of tooling dedicated to front-end development, in particular bundlers that can automatically build your static pages, compress images, optimise CSS, etc. While it can be a pain to get this set up, once it's there, it's a very powerful tool to sending well-optimised results to browsers.
So in principle, I agree that we shouldn't use JS if we don't need it, but my problem is often that, although the space for better tooling clearly should exist, it just isn't there.
* Modularisation is really easy. Components are ultimately just functions, with all the benefits for splitting up and deduplicating code that that brings. You don't need to create files to split up code units, which makes it a lot easier to create smaller, more flexible units.
* You're writing templates in a real programming language, ideally one you already know. Yes, there's a bit of syntax sugar with JSX, although in principle you don't need it, but everything else is just javascript. For example, things like importing other files just works - there's no special "partials" directory, and you don't need to figure out how this templating library approaches paths.
* You can manage your CSS much more easily with tools like CSS-in-JS or CSS Modules. Your styles are scoped to your components, which means that dead styles are much easier to find and remove, and you're less likely to have "action at a distance" issues from unexpected rules applying in places you don't expect.
* You have access to a lot of tooling dedicated to front-end development, in particular bundlers that can automatically build your static pages, compress images, optimise CSS, etc. While it can be a pain to get this set up, once it's there, it's a very powerful tool to sending well-optimised results to browsers.
So in principle, I agree that we shouldn't use JS if we don't need it, but my problem is often that, although the space for better tooling clearly should exist, it just isn't there.