Recently I came across this idea that expert should know the limits of their tool. This is not a new idea, I heard it many times, but I thought:

Huh, I'm React developer, so I suppose to know that, right?

And it is easy for me, for example, to say when I would use RDBMS (PostgreSQL) vs key-value store (Redis) vs graph database (Neo4j), but I kind of paused before I was able to answer this question for React. Maybe I don't have that diverse experience in React (all tasks were similar).

My answer would be:

• simple websites, which don't have very much interactivity/states, like landing page, don't need React. It can be easily built with HTML, CSS and maybe something, like Turbolinks to improve page switch speed
• highly interactive pages, which need to use Canvas or WebGL and WASM, like this one https://perspective.finos.org/. There are React renderers which can render React to Canvas though.

When would you prefer something else to React? What are the pain points of React?

Asking for a friend React developer.