Vercel is widely perceived as driving React development to promote its hosting, but the reality is that the React team needed Vercel to implement its ideas, argues Redux maintainer Mark Erikson, who also acknowledges that the state of React is “complicated and fractured.”

Erikson is the creator of Redux Toolkit, Redux being a popular state management tool for React, and well-known in the React community.

React and React-based frameworks are the most popular approach to building applications today, by most measures. JavaScript is the most widely-used language, with TypeScript not far behind among professional programmers; and React and React-based Next.js are the most popular web frameworks, according to the most recent StackOverflow survey. 

Despite this popularity, there is considerable dissatisfaction with React in the community and ecosystem. The React team has embraced React Server Components (RSCs) but it documents Vercel-sponsored Next.js as the only full implementation; and Next.js works best when Vercel-hosted, leading to the suspicion that Vercel has steered React into becoming a gateway to its platform, rather than a vendor-neutral framework.

Erikson said in a lengthy post that this is a misconception. The problem, he believes, is that when the React team at Meta (where the framework originated) became convinced it should build server-side components into the framework, it needed an outside sponsor. Meta itself uses React extensively, but “has its own massive server infrastructure, including standard techniques for data fetching, routing, security, and more,” he said. The consequence is that Meta uses React in a different way to most of the React community, and rarely uses third-party libraries.

In late 2021 some React core team members left Meta to join Vercel, and this led to “the Next team spending huge amounts of time, money, and engineering effort to design and build the Next App Router as the first working implementation of RSCs.”

A related issue is that the way RSCs are designed means every framework uses and implements them in a different way. Erikson described RSCs as a “hybrid feature” with the main functionality in the React core platform but not usable without additional bundler, router and framework configuration. The implication is that the React team is unable to ship a complete RSCs implementation on its own.

It is not so much Vercel and Next.js taking over React, argued Erikson, as the React team taking over Next.js. “I also don’t see evidence that Vercel is driving the design of React, or that the emphasis on frameworks and RSCs is with the specific intent to make Vercel money,” he said.

Whether or not this is the case, Erikson acknowledges that the React community and ecosystem is fractured. There is, he said, an increasing split between how the React team wants the framework to be used, and how the community uses it in practice.

Download statistics show that there is still high demand for “plain SPA (single page application) projects in the React ecosystem.”

There is a sense in the community though that Erikson has missed some of the key issues. “The reality is that in 2025 React is bad news. Despite 3+ years of development and the mentioned SPA improvements, it’s still the slowest frontend framework, still has the same memoization and re-rendering issues, still fights developers every step of the way in terms of styling, routing, and state management,” said a comment to Erikson’s post.

Another topic that Erikson does not mention is excessive complexity. “For me the biggest factor by far is the additional complexity SSR [server-side rendering] and frameworks bring. And the way the React team presented that choice between frameworks and plain React as SPA felt like they live in a totally different world and don’t even understand my concerns,” said a developer on Reddit.

Another comment said that although React is the best thing out there, “my team spends a larger chunk of our time dealing with React/Next specific issues rather than our own business logic for the first time in the 6+ years I’ve been using React.”

These are hard issues for the React team to fix and the fractured ecosystem may promote interest in other approaches.