Eric Clemmons:

At work this past quarter, we painstakingly started three new projects at work. I say “painstakingly” because every project required decisions to be made around tooling depending on the scope & needs.

Ultimately, the problem is that by choosing React (and inherently JSX), you’ve unwittingly opted into a confusing nest of build tools, boilerplate, linters, & time-sinks to deal with before you ever get to create anything.

the React ecosystem have, largely, opted for discrete modularization at the cost of terse APIs by offloading their architectural underpinnings to the user and, as a result, worsen the developer experience in aggregate.

Yep, the developer experience in Javascript at the moment is painful. The wide array of choice is crippling and the boilerplates and generators aren’t enough. I hope the following prediction from the article comes true.

2016 will likely involve a serious, focused conjoining of projects, tools, and language features to merge the best and brightest packages/tools/boilerplates into more formalized projects. — Matt Keas in State of the Union.js