The React Foundation

Meta’s $3M Pledge: Generous or Token?

• Many see $3M over 5 years (~$600k/year) as tiny relative to Meta’s scale and React’s importance, arguing a serious endowment would better reflect responsibility for a de‑facto standard.
• Others counter that Meta already funded a large core team for a decade and continues to do so; $3M plus “dedicated engineering support” is substantial compared to the $0 most OSS gets.
• Debate centers on expectations vs entitlement: licenses don’t obligate further funding, but some feel ultra‑wealthy firms are fair targets for criticism when they give “rounding error” sums.

Vercel’s Role and Conflict of Interest

• Strong concern that Vercel, as a board member and major employer of React core devs, steers React toward SSR/Server Components that drive usage of its hosting platform.
• Critics describe Next.js as overengineered, brittle, slow to build, hard to self‑host at scale, and increasingly vendor‑locked to Vercel; they cite confusing caching, middleware design, painful migrations, and a recent auth bypass CVE.
• Supporters say Next.js “just works” for many apps, has enabled React’s real‑world evolution, and that complaints are overrepresented by frustrated users.
• Political backlash against Vercel’s CEO (e.g. high‑profile photo‑ops) fuels boycotts for some; others argue tools should be judged transactionally, not on leaders’ politics.

React’s Direction: From Simple View Lib to Complex Platform

• A big thread laments that React peaked around 16; hooks, Suspense, concurrent features, RSC, and SSR are seen as confusing, “magic,” and tailored to big‑company needs.
• Several devs report abandoning React/Next for Vue, Svelte, Lit, Astro, Preact, Angular, or even Flutter/Web Components, citing lower cognitive load and less churn.
• Others defend React as a long‑lived, mostly backward‑compatible workhorse whose component/state model still solves real problems; they see complaints as underestimating its stability vs past JS churn.

Governance, Foundations, and Control

• Some welcome the foundation as a way to dilute any single company’s control and formalize multi‑stakeholder input, possibly even curbing Vercel’s influence.
• Others are skeptical: a custom “private foundation” run by mega‑corps looks like a cartel, less democratic than joining existing bodies (e.g., OpenJS); they doubt community needs will override sponsor interests.