The new design/architecture allows them to do great stuff in the name of efficiency; for example, when browsing through some parts of the UI, it's now much more capable of just updating the part of the page that's changed, rather than having to reload the entire thing. This is a significantly better approach for a lot of things.
I understand that the 'updating the part of the page that's changed' functionality is now dramatically slower, more unresponsive, and less reliable than the 'reload the entire thing' approach was, and it feels like browsing the site via Citrix over dial-up half the time, but look, sacrifices have to be made in the name of making things better even if the sacrifice is that things get worse instead.
> to do great stuff in the name of efficiency; for example, when browsing through some parts of the UI, it's now much more capable of just updating the part of the page that's changed
Are you implying that this only doable with React? I mean just for the fun of it you can look at this video:
> for example, when browsing through some parts of the UI
React allows this? I didn't realize that I needed React to do this when we used Java and Js to do this 20 years ago. I also didn't realize I needed React to do this when we used Scala and generated Js to do this 10 years ago. JFC, the world didn't start when you turned 18.
> I understand that the 'updating the part of the page that's changed' functionality is now dramatically slower, more unresponsive, and less reliable than the 'reload the entire thing' approach was, and it feels like browsing the site via Citrix over dial-up half the time, but look, sacrifices have to be made in the name of making things better even if the sacrifice is that things get worse instead.
GitHub used jQuery + pjax to do exactly this a decade ago - rendered HTML for smaller components was fetched and replaced in-place with a single DOM update. It even had fancy sliding transitions.