Is React beginner friendly?

No.

It’s not.

React looks like very appealing for beginners, because each component looks like a brick you can easily (almost physically) manipulate with a very fine granularity.

The easy part

And each component sounds very intuitive.

Let’s take a basic example, taken from one of my previous project :

import { NextSeo } from 'next-seo';

import Navigation from '../components/navigation';
import ScrollToTop from '../components/ScrollToTop';

const About = () => (
  <div>
    <NextSeo title="About | Some title | Some subtitle" description="lorem ipsum" />

    <ScrollToTop />
    <Navigation />
  </div>
);

How good is that?

Even with little or no dev experience, you can guess that the about page uses a ScrollToTop, and a Navigation component.

Oh, and SEO is also handled by a component given by the underlying framework (yes, it’s NextJS).

So good!

So Easy!

The trap

No let’s face it, React is full of akward traps.

Here is the official docs about “don’t use useEffect here”.

You can achieve all problems in React in multiple ways, and you have no clue, unless you spend countless hours on the docs, to know which one is “the right way” or not.

Another possibility is to spend your night to read how React replaced the whole underlying DOM Event system, then try to understand how hooks tries to play with this replacement, and then you start to guess what to do and what to avoid with React.

No full integration

The last huge problem with React is the complete lack of deep integration.

Oh, I know, there are some.

ShipFast (commercial), NextJS (free, but hugely bound to private PaaS company), Blitz (build on top of NextJS, with same inconvenients), React-Router (not used by all the community), Redwood (same)…

So there are no “React way” to build something from top to bottom.

Good luck for long-term maintenance.

Still possible of course, but…

definetely not for beginners.