Smart and dumb components are one of the reasons why I quickly jumped ship to Vue. It's too complicated and the starter apps make it worse. You get four level deep directory structures where each dir contains a single file of like five lines. It feels like knitting a castle.

Vue certainly has its own cruft, but it's at least somewhat simpler when it comes to how components compose.

The "container/presentational" component pattern is completely optional. If you want to write components that both fetch and display data, that's entirely up to you. Dan Abramov, who wrote the most widely referenced post discussing the topic ([0]), recently said that he somewhat regrets writing it because many people have assumed it's a strict rule that must be followed ([1]).

That said, it _is_ a very useful pattern, and can help with conceptual management of components. I have links to a number of additional articles discussing this pattern as part of my React/Redux links list ([2]).

[0] https://medium.com/@dan_abramov/smart-and-dumb-components-7c...

[1] https://twitter.com/dan_abramov/status/802569801906475008

[2] https://github.com/markerikson/react-redux-links/blob/master...

React itself is actually a pretty simple library. The problem is that it's not the whole story, so you need other bits and pieces to put together a functional SPA. Ender redux, react-router, etc. And because React tries to explicitly not be so opinionated about what you should use, the way you learn about this stuff is not from the official tutorial, but from various blog posts.

There are also resources like this: https://github.com/kriasoft/react-starter-kit. On the surface it's great. But for my taste it's organized very poorly. You have all your reusable (NB: reusable != reused) components in one place, and all your pages in another. Each component consists of exactly 3 files that are 3 directory levels down. Pages (views? containers?) are in a separate directory structure where each page consists of 3 files that are 3 directory levels down. I guess if your SPA consists of hundreds of pages/views/containers with most components reused many times this makes sense. For my applications (low dozens of pages/views/containers) this seems like a huge overkill.

And don't get me started on the redux theory of all global state all the time, which actually seems to not be ideal for things like "I just want a more complex ", and you have a very scattered learning curve.

By contrast, Vue has a pretty sane slightly opinionated learning curve. Sure, there are a few things you need to figure out (XHR/Websockets + VueX + promises don't have a decent recipe in the docs), but overall it's much more coherent.