React Makes You a Bad Developer
When I started my programming journey, during college days it was all C# and .NET. It was structured, logical, and gave me a solid foundation in software development or so I thought. Fresh out of college, armed with my degree and a naive sense of optimism, I stepped into the corporate tech world not knowing a single thing about React.
Then React happened.
The transition was seamless. React felt like a natural progression. Components made sense. JSX felt intuitive. And suddenly, I was shipping features at a pace I’d never experienced before. But here’s the thing: I wasn’t learning JavaScript. I was learning React. And there’s a massive difference.
The React Trap
React is incredibly popular right now, and for good reason. It’s powerful, it’s elegant, and it solves real problems. But here’s what worries me: a lot of developers today are learning React before they learn JavaScript. They jump into tutorials, follow some JSX patterns, understand hooks, and boom—they think they know how to code.
But they don’t. They know React.
When I finally had to step outside the React bubble—to write Node.js backends, to debug browser APIs, to manipulate the DOM directly—I hit a wall. I realized how much I’d been relying on React to abstract away the messy, important details of how JavaScript actually works.
React is like a very comfortable abstraction layer. And abstractions, while useful, can make you lazy.
The Hidden Costs
State Management: In React, you use useState and manage state in a declarative way. It’s clean, it’s nice. But underneath, there’s a whole world of JavaScript state management patterns you’ll never see. React handles the noise for you. But what happens when you need to understand how state actually flows in a large application? React’s synthetic state management can be a crutch.
Event Handling: Another one. onClick={handleClick} feels familiar, but it’s a lie. In vanilla JS, we have to use addEventListener and see the full picture of event propagation, the native event object. React’s synthetic events wrap all that up, and I didn’t even notice until I hit a wall debugging something outside its ecosystem. I’d been coasting, and it showed.
The Component Mindset Trap
React’s component-based architecture is another double-edged sword. It’s marketed as a clean, modular way to build UIs, and it is, in a way. But it also warps how you think about programming logic. In a traditional setup, you might write a script that manipulates the DOM directly or orchestrates behavior across multiple systems. In React, everything becomes a component. Everything.
This can be limiting. It teaches you one way to structure code, and if that way doesn’t fit your next project, you’re lost.
The Verdict
Here’s my hot take: React is an amazing tool. But if you’re just starting out in programming, don’t start with React. Learn JavaScript first. Really learn it.
If you’re mentoring junior developers (or if you’re one yourself), here’s what I’d say: skip React for now. Learn JavaScript. I mean really learn it. Build something ugly and functional with no frameworks. Get your hands dirty with the web’s quirks. Then, if you want, pick up React later. It’ll be a tool, not your whole identity. Because here’s what I’ve learned the hard way: React doesn’t make you a better developer. It makes you a better React developer. And for me, that’s not enough anymore.