10 years and we are still building custom forms from the same primitive building blocks.

And with react having to fudge with the state of DOM input components, it's been a messy ride.

And yet, the idea of describing your UI and have a library figure out what needs to be repainted has been liberating. React certainly wasn't the first, but it certainly was the most elegant one at the time.

I wish React would split up and go back to the roots: Have it deal with rendering - and nothing else.

Have optional companion projects that deal with the various forms of state and side-fx.

I've been maintaining a project for 4 years now (~40k downloads/mo on NPM, 400+ stars) that is simply glue code between a React form management library and a React UI library. It was really hard to get right, still isn't perfect, and over the years has required several major upgrades to keep up with changes in all three. Luckily, I have very good unit tests and snapshots that ensure upgrades don't break things. You'd think it would be easier, but it isn't.

I really wish React would just own the low level forms stuff and get rid of the need for a 3rd party form management library. That said, because it is frontend JS, there are 1000 different ways to bike shed this problem and because it is form stuff, there is no one solution that fits all use cases.

Which one? This sounds like it could be useful for me