Stop Blaming React for Your State Management Hangover

Every time a React app misbehaves, the first tweet is some variation of “React sucks.” No, it isn’t (okay, who am I kidding, maybe a little bit) but what’s really breaking is your mental model of state.

Developers keep reaching for new state management libraries the way hungover people reach for greasy food: hoping it’ll fix what’s fundamentally self-inflicted. Zustand, Jotai, Recoil, Valtio — they’re all great tools.

But none of them can save you from chaos if you don’t understand how data moves through your app. React…