import React from 'react'; Feels like just a line. But that one line can quietly pull in ~100kb - 1mb of bundle size …and all that JavaScript your browser now has to, download, parse, and execute. It introduces layers—abstractions, dependencies, and more JavaScript to the browser. And before you realize it, your “simple project” has grown into hundreds of KBs… sometimes MBs. React isn’t heavy. It just makes it very easy to be careless. If your project truly doesn’t need complex state, routing, or heavy UI logic—why start there? Frameworks like Petite Vue or Alpine.js let you add interactivity without committing to an entire ecosystem. Or if you like JSX (like I do), Preact would do just fine. Just this one decision—choosing simplicity over overengineering— could save you in costs, and probably users you’d otherwise lose to slow load times. And remember, React exists because Facebook had a problem, and you probably don’t have it yet. #WebDevelopment #Frontend #JavaScript #ReactJS #SoftwareEngineering
Curious—what’s something you overengineered that you’d build differently today?
Where do you draw the line between “future-proofing” and overengineering?
The right tool isn’t the most powerful one, it’s the most appropriate one.