React Is a Default, Not a Law

React is the default UI library the way GitHub is the default forge: not because a standards body voted, but because the graph of jobs, tutorials, and npm packages already points there.¹ Gravity is not a law of physics. It is a crowd.

mystic-bytes is Jekyll. Essays are files. The page is HTML. I do not mount a component tree to publish a paragraph. Cursor and GitHub will still offer React snippets because that is what the index contains. I decline them for this repo the same way I decline a Kubernetes sidebar for Pages.

Use React when you have UI state that actually deserves a client runtime: a Rails app with a dense dashboard, a design tool, anything that is not a document. Do not use it as baptism for a writing site. The default is a hiring convenience. The law would be “HTML is illegal,” and nobody passed that.

If the work is a document, ship a document. Leave the ecosystem gravity for the products that need a tree of components and a reconciliation loop.

— JV · Dark Heart Labs.

References

React Docs, “Describing the UI,” https://react.dev/learn. The official model of components and declarative UI — the library the crowd treated as a default. ↩