What are your least favorite parts of Redux and React?

[timuric]

We all know that you are a React enthusiast, but are there things in React and Redux that you personally dislike or think could be done better? Those could be fundamental aspects or just small details.

[gaearon]

React

• Context used to be very flaky (will mostly be solved in 0.14)
• Duplicate Reacts don't work together (should be much better in 0.15 where react-dom is truly separate thing, and many reacts can coexist)
• Weird error messages when DOM is invalid, e.g. nested links (will be solved in 0.14)
• It's currently hard to write universal components against React and React Native (will be solved soon after 0.14)
• Focus management is imperative, so it forces us back into DOM land
• Higher-order components are sometimes a pain because people keep wanting to have refs or fire methods and you can't teach them to stop doing that because they have valid reasons (e.g. see focus management)

I can't think of anything else much. I'm pretty satisfied with React, and while there are frameworks like Cycle that hate on setState(), you can adapt Cycle's patterns to React just fine if they indeed prove better.

Redux

• It doesn't solve data fetching like Relay
• Functional API and extensive use of higher-order functions turns off beginners
• It's not "purely functional" like Cycle either—feels like I'm doing something dirty
• I'm not very satisfied with putting async API calls and the middleware system, but it's still the best we could come up with

These are conscious fundamental limitations by design and scope, of course. If I could fix them, I would have already.