Eh, I feel like that's any web framework in any language. Take Django for instance. If you're doing a very boilerplate project, then it's pretty slick. But as soon as you start trying to do any customization you go down a rabbithole of subclasses and mixins, where looking at the source is usually more helpful than the documentation.

I think the reality is web applications stand on the shoulders of lots of giants. We're only able to get anything done thanks to abstraction that someone else did for us. We still have a need to see below the surface occasionally, though, and finding the balance between readability and customizability is an eternal struggle. Plus, everyone has their preferences: I hated Angular at first because of its steep learning curve, and now love it for its strictness.

I guess my feeling comes from spending time with opinionated frameworks like Rails. There are sane defaults and you’re up and running quickly. Any time I look at something like React or similar, the instructions for getting started are written like “If you’re using yarn, do this. If you’re using grunt, do this other thing”. I don’t have either, so now I have to choose one before I can proceed. Instead, I just close the browser tab and go on to something else.

I currently work on a codebase that is in part React based, and I have no idea how to get it running from scratch or how data flows through. It seems asinine.