This is a good article, but I've noticed that the adjective "modern" is used disproportionately more in the world of JavaScript, compared to other tech stacks. Is it more performant, more maintainable, faster to develop, compatible with more devices/platforms? If not, what is the advantage of being modern? That said, I'm a fan of JavaScript and have been writing it since 2001, and many of the backends I write are Node.
It's a fair criticism. React has been around for ten years now. Which by Javascript standards makes it ancient. IMHO, the javascript community has been chasing its tail a bit for most of that time in the sense that there have been very few real innovations. People keep on reinventing the same wheels. But mostly the same things that were a problem ten years ago are still problems. Problems such as managing state in a sane way, preventing issues with performance related to state changes, and keeping code bases maintainable. I'm not sure that modern is a word I'd slap on the notion of not quite having figured out those things still.
I have good hopes for some disruptions to arrive on the web via wasm. There are some interesting things happening in that space that are increasingly less about Javascript, dom trees, css, and all the limitations that come with those and more about leveling the playing field with mobile where UIs are more competitive and non Javascript frameworks seem to be preferred over the poor man's choice (aka. web based).
I'm saying that as somebody actually pushing web based on mobile (we are about to release a PWA). Just acknowledging the reality that web-based is still considered a huge compromise on ux, performance, and capabilities on mobile. Good enough is the best you can say about it. Some of those mobile frameworks (flutter, compose web, and others) are now coming to the web via wasm. IMHO, there are a lot more interesting things that could be done in that space in the next years.
Author here! I struggled with the word "modern" – I could have said "current gen" or "post-React" or even "Solid-inspired" frankly, but I thought "modern" was succinct with the right amount of punchiness.
Obviously a lot of these techniques are pretty novel, and maybe they won't stand the test of time. Or maybe a new browser standard will make them obsolete eventually. But for now these seem to be the current wave anyway.
Perhaps you could have said that it is built using more modern JS APIs - template literals instead of string manipulation, Proxy(), queueMicrotask etc.
My observation is that there is a lot more cargo-culting / trendchasing in the JS world, largely due to its low barrier to entry. The overuse of "modern" is a dogma more than anything.
(I mainly work on native desktop apps, but can use JS if needed.)
