React wants to win you back…

Key Takeaways

Last week I got to participate in my favorite activity of the year. No, it wasn't watching all the over leveraged crypto bros learn what a margin call is. It was hate watching React Conf. As an anti-React influencer, every year I crawl into my smelt snuggie and I watch the React team try to convince everyone that their new APIs fix all of their old APIs. And though it hurts me to say it, this year I think they may have actually done it. I know this isn't an AI channel now, but in today's video we'll revisit the worst parts of React to see if the announcements they made at React Conf will actually make a difference. It is October 17th, 2025 and you're watching The Code Report. The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was making referential stability a prerequisite to writing React apps that don't blow up. It just last month Cloudflare had a massive outage because their dashboard kept making unnecessary calls to one of their own APIs, which led to them basically DDoS-ing themselves. If you're a React dev, you know this is the primary use case for React's use effect hook and it's exactly what caused this embarrassing bug for Cloudflare. But it's hard to blame React for this. The whole situation could have been avoided if only the poor dev at Cloudflare would have read the docs on use effect, then this post which shows you when to use it, then this post which shows you when to not use it, then this post which shows you what it actually does, then this post which shows you how to use it correctly. And now with React 19.2, this post which shows you how to work around it with React's new use effect event hook. The way it works is it creates a function that you can use inside of use effect without needing to declare it in the dependency array. This is nice for situations like this where you need to use a value inside of use effect but don't want the effect to rerun when it changes. And the other big API addition was the new activity component, which you can think of like a smarter display none that React itself controls. It lets you show and hide certain components, but unlike display none, React is able to maintain the state of those components across visibility and also deprioritize the work it does for hidden components. And if you've been drinking your lead laced protein and want to live on the edge, you can install React's canary version where you'll get the new view transition component for animating transitions between different UIs. And you'll be able to pass a ref to a fragment, which makes working with platform APIs a little easier. But the most impactful announcements of the conference may have not been related to the React API. First, React compiler finally hit 1.0. If you've been in any React codebase lately, you've probably noticed a weird smell coming from all the unnecessary memoization. Hooks like use memo and use callback are used as a performance silver bullet to memoize values between renders. But the sad reality is that they usually just make your app slower if you don't actually know what you're doing. And thankfully, now the React compiler is stable, it'll auto-optimize your app for you so you can stop pretending you care about how many times it re-renders. And finally, after 15 years of being owned by Meta, both React and React Native are being moved to a new foundation with an independent technical governance structure to, quote, "ensure the future of React." But if you'd like to avoid that future entirely, you can do what the Remix team did and just ditch it all together. Remix 3, built by the same authors as Remix, Reach Router, React Router, and React Router Framework, is a brand new framework that embraces web fundamentals like closures and events. It'll come with TypeScript and JSX support out of the box, but unlike React, it won't come with 15 years of, "Oopsie, never minds." Although nothing has been officially released yet, so it's technically vaporware, the vision of a simple AI-friendly framework built on web APIs is appealing to anyone who still has no idea what a React transition is. And speaking of transitions, the only thing that truly matters is that your UI looks beautiful for the end user. And that's why you need to know about mobbin.com, the sponsor of today's video. I've been using Mobbin for over 5 years now to get highly detailed breakdowns of every screen in thousands of popular applications. It even shows entire user flows. And so if you want to see how different apps design their onboarding or checkout, you can click through each screen, then copy and paste the whole thing into Figma to kickstart your own design. You can also filter by app category and even the specific UI elements you want to steal for your next project. Give Mobbin a try for free right now and use the link below to get an extra 20% discount. This has been The Code Report. Thanks for watching and I will see you in the next one. [Music]