I’m more proud of these 128 kilobytes than anything I’ve built since | by Mike Hall | Jul, 2025 | Medium

Escape Velocity: Break Free from Framework Gravity — Den Odell

React is no longer just a library. It’s a full ecosystem that defines how frontend developers are allowed to think.

Real talk!

Browsers now ship View Transitions, Container Queries, and smarter scheduling primitives. The platform keeps evolving at a fair pace, but most teams won’t touch these capabilities until React officially wraps them in a hook or they show up in Next.js docs.

Innovation keeps happening right across the ecosystem, but for many it only becomes “real” once React validates the approach. Which is fine, assuming you enjoy waiting for permission to use the platform you’re already building on.

Zing!

The critique isn’t that React is bad, but that treating any single framework as infrastructure creates blind spots in how we think and build. When React becomes the lens through which we see the web, we stop noticing what the platform itself can already do, and we stop reaching for native solutions because we’re waiting for the framework-approved version to show up first.

If your team’s evolution depends on a single framework’s roadmap, you are not steering your product; you are waiting for permission to move.

Is it Time to Regulate React? – David Bushell – Web Dev (UK)

React exists as a profound perversion of the web platform. React has failed upwards to widespread adoption because it provides a “developer experience” that bypasses the hard parts. Like learning HTML, or CSS, or JavaScript. Even learning React itself is discouraged; that’s for adults, you should use meta-frameworks. React devs are burdened with multi-megabyte monstrosities before they’ve written a single line of code. You cannot fix “too much JavaScript” with more JavaScript and yet React devs are trained to npm install until their problems become their users’ problems.

V7: Video Killed the Web Browser Star | Rob Weychert

Grrr… it turns out that browsers exhibit some very frustrating behaviour when it comes to the video element. Rob has the details…

The present and potential future of progressive image rendering - JakeArchibald.com

When I set about writing this article, I intended it to be a strong argument for progressive rendering. But after digging into it, my feelings are less certain.

JavaScript broke the web (and called it progress) - Jono Alderson

Semantic HTML? Optional. Server-side rendering? Rebuilt from scratch. Accessibility? Maybe, if there’s time. Performance? Who cares, when you can save costs by putting loading burdens onto the user’s device, instead of your server?

So gradually, the web became something you had to compile before you could publish. Not because users needed it. But because developers wanted it to feel modern.

Everything’s optimised for developers – and hostile to everyone else.

This isn’t accidental. It’s cultural. We’ve created an industry where complexity is celebrated. Where cleverness is rewarded. Where engineering sophistication is valued more than clarity, usability, or commercial effectiveness.