If you are not using React in 2025, you are probably being irresponsible

Let me start by saying this: I love Svelte. I'm a huge Svelte nerd. Vue is elegant. SolidJS is brilliant. But if you're building a production application in 2025 and you're not using React, you're probably being irresponsible.

This isn't about framework wars or personal preferences. This is about making pragmatic decisions in a rapidly evolving technological landscape where AI is fundamentally changing how we write code.

The AI Revolution Changes Everything

Here's the uncomfortable truth: Every major AI coding assistant has been trained predominantly on React code. GitHub Copilot, Cursor, Claude, ChatGPT, you name it. Why? Because React dominates the open-source ecosystem. It's not even close. The sheer volume of React repositories, tutorials, Stack Overflow answers, and production codebases means that AI models have seen every possible React pattern a thousand times over. They understand hooks, they understand context, they understand the component lifecycle, and they can predict what you're trying to build before you've even finished typing.

When you choose React in 2025, you're not just choosing a framework. You're choosing AI assistants that actually understand your codebase, code generation that works out of the box, debugging help that's accurate and relevant, and migration paths that AI can actually assist with. This isn't a minor convenience anymore. In an era where developer productivity is increasingly augmented by AI, choosing a framework that AI doesn't understand well is like choosing to code with one hand tied behind your back.

Try getting the same level of AI assistance with a niche framework. You'll spend more time correcting the AI than actually building features. The AI will hallucinate APIs that don't exist, suggest patterns that don't apply, and generate code that looks almost right but fails in subtle ways. Every prompt becomes a teaching exercise where you're training the AI about your framework instead of building your product.

The Ecosystem Argument

React's ecosystem isn't just large, it's battle-tested at scale. When you need a date picker that handles timezones correctly, a data grid that can handle 100,000 rows, an accessibility-compliant modal, or a forms library that handles every edge case, you'll find multiple production-ready options for React. These aren't hobby projects or proof-of-concepts. They're libraries being used by Fortune 500 companies, maintained by teams, with proper documentation, TypeScript definitions, and regular security updates. You have choices, real choices, between different approaches and philosophies, all within the React ecosystem.

For other frameworks? You might find one option, maybe two, and you'll probably need to fork it to fix that one critical bug. The maintainer might have moved on to other projects. The last commit might be six months old with dozens of unresolved issues. You'll end up maintaining not just your application, but half the libraries it depends on. That's not building a product, that's building an entire ecosystem from scratch.

The Hiring Reality

"But our developers prefer Framework X!"

That's great. Now try hiring five senior developers who know Framework X well enough to maintain a production application. In this market. With your budget. The reality is that every company is fighting for talent, and the talent pool for niche frameworks is tiny. You'll spend months searching for the right person, and when you find them, they'll command a premium because they know how rare their skillset is. Or worse, you'll compromise and hire someone who's "willing to learn" Framework X, and now you're paying senior developer rates for junior-level productivity while they ramp up.

With React, you have access to the largest pool of experienced developers in the frontend world. They can hit the ground running. They know the patterns. They've made the mistakes before on someone else's dime. They've built complex state management solutions, they've optimized performance bottlenecks, they've dealt with SSR and hydration issues. When you hire a React developer, you're not just hiring someone who knows JSX syntax. You're hiring years of collective community knowledge and battle-tested experience.

The Stability Paradox

"React changes too much!"

Actually, React is one of the most stable frameworks out there. Code written in React 16 still works today. Can you say the same about the framework that did a complete rewrite for v2? Or the one that deprecated half its API in the last major version? The React team's obsession with backwards compatibility might seem boring, but it's exactly what you want when you're maintaining a production application that generates revenue. Every breaking change in a framework is a hidden cost: developer time to migrate, potential bugs introduced during the migration, testing, deployment risks, and the opportunity cost of not building new features.

React's commitment to backwards compatibility isn't sexy, but it's responsible. Your code from 2020 still works. Your team's knowledge still applies. Your investment is protected. Yes, there are new patterns and better ways to do things, but you can adopt them gradually, when it makes sense for your team and your product. You're not forced into a massive rewrite every 18 months just to stay current. That class component from 2018? It still works perfectly alongside your new hooks-based components. That's not technical debt, that's technical stability.

The Same Goes for Tailwind

While we're being honest, let's talk about CSS. If you're not using Tailwind in 2025, you're making the same mistake.

"But CSS-in-JS is more powerful!" "But CSS Modules are more pure!" "But my custom CSS architecture is more elegant!"

Sure. And how's that working out when your new developer needs three days to understand your styling architecture? When your AI assistant generates styles that don't match your conventions? When you need to prototype something quickly? When you're trying to maintain consistency across a large team? Every custom CSS architecture is a unique snowflake that requires documentation, onboarding, and constant evangelism to maintain consistency. You'll have lengthy discussions about naming conventions, file organization, and whether that new component should be a modifier or its own class. Meanwhile, your competitors are shipping features.

Tailwind, like React, isn't perfect. But it's the responsible choice. It's what AI understands. It's what developers know. It's what gets the job done. When everyone on your team speaks the same design language, when your AI assistant can generate pixel-perfect UI components, when you can prototype a new feature in minutes instead of hours, that's not giving up on craftsmanship. That's choosing productivity and consistency over architectural purity.

The Real-World Test

Here's my litmus test for technical decisions in 2025:

If you had to hand over your codebase to a competent team tomorrow, how quickly could they be productive?

With React and Tailwind, any senior developer can jump in. AI assistants are immediately helpful. Documentation and examples are everywhere. Stack Overflow has your back. The upgrade path is clear. You can find contractors who can help with specific features. You can hire junior developers and they can be productive within a week. Your team can take vacations without the project grinding to a halt because they're the only one who understands the clever abstraction layer.

With your boutique framework and artisanal styling solution? Good luck. You've created a beautiful, unique, perfectly crafted cage that only you and your original team truly understand. Every new hire extends your onboarding time. Every developer who leaves takes irreplaceable knowledge with them. Every feature takes longer because you're not just solving business problems, you're maintaining your special ecosystem.

But What About Innovation?

"This is just choosing the safe, boring option!"

No. This is choosing the foundation that lets you innovate where it matters: in your product, not in your infrastructure. Your users don't care if you're using the latest experimental framework. They care if your app solves their problems. They care if it's fast, reliable, and gets regular updates with new features. They care if bugs get fixed quickly. None of that is easier with a cutting-edge framework. In fact, it's usually harder.

When you choose React and Tailwind, you're not giving up on innovation. You're focusing it where it provides value to your users. You're building on a stable foundation that lets you move fast without breaking things. You can experiment with new product features instead of debugging framework quirks. You can invest in better user experience instead of maintaining custom tooling. You can ship that ambitious new feature because you're not stuck in a migration to the framework's new architecture.

The Responsible Choice

Being responsible doesn't mean being boring. It means choosing tools that your team can grow with, building on foundations that will exist in 5 years, optimizing for maintainability over cleverness, and accepting that sometimes the popular choice is popular for good reasons. It means acknowledging that your job isn't to build the most technically interesting solution, but to deliver value to users and stakeholders. It means recognizing that every technical decision has human and business implications that extend far beyond the elegance of the code.

Conclusion

I'll keep experimenting with Svelte for my side projects. I'll keep admiring Vue's elegance. I'll keep being impressed by SolidJS's performance. These frameworks push the boundaries of what's possible, and we need that innovation to move the web forward. They inspire new patterns and challenge conventional thinking. That's valuable and necessary for the evolution of our craft.

But when it's time to build something real, something that needs to scale, something that needs to be maintained, something that needs to hire for, I'm choosing React and Tailwind. When there's a business depending on the technology choices, when there are users expecting reliability, when there's a team that needs to collaborate effectively, the decision becomes clear.

Not because they're perfect. Not because they're exciting. But because in 2025, with AI as our copilot and pragmatism as our guide, they're the responsible choice. The gap between React and other frameworks isn't about features or performance anymore. It's about ecosystem, talent, AI assistance, and proven scalability. In the age of AI-assisted development, that gap is only getting wider.

And if that makes me boring, I'll take boring and shipped over clever and stuck every single time. Because at the end of the day, the best framework is the one that lets you focus on what really matters: building great products that solve real problems for real people.