React is everywhere, powering millions of websites and used by every major tech company. It's been around for over 12 years, and both React and its tooling are incredibly mature. There's a reason it became the default choice for so many teams - the ecosystem is massive, jobs are plentiful, and you can build basically anything.

But it's not perfect. Our weather app showcases both React's strengths and frustrations. The component model is elegant, useState and useEffect work fine for simple state, and the custom useWeatherData hook abstracts the weather logic nicely. But you're constantly thinking about re-renders, dependency arrays, and manual memoization.

The virtual DOM adds overhead that other frameworks avoid entirely. Need to optimize performance? Time to sprinkle React.memo, useCallback, and useMemo everywhere. Coming from Svelte or Solid, all this manual work feels tedious. But the developer tooling is exceptional and the community support is unmatched.

The JSX syntax is familiar once you get used to the quirks - className instead of class, self-closing tags, and JavaScript expressions in curly braces. Controlled components with value and onChange work well for forms, though they're more verbose than Vue's v-model.

React really shines for complex applications where the ecosystem matters. We didn't need Redux, React Query, or code splitting for this simple weather app, but for something like Web Check, these tools become essential. The flexibility to choose your own architecture is both React's blessing and curse.