I built a simple wrapper between two popular libraries, MUI and React Final Form called aptly mui-rff [1]. I've been maintaining this library for years now. It gets ~40k downloads a month off of NPM.
It still isn't perfect, some of the widgets have weird edgecase failures. It took a long time to get it to the point where it is now. The saving grace over time has been that I wrote a decent amount of unit tests right from the start. This has thankfully allowed me to upgrade the library safely over time but wow... just wow... I've spent so much time just fixing things that break because of random bits of code rot.
The fact that this is a ~10 page blog post and still doesn't cover all the edge cases says so much about what is wrong with React and forms. It shouldn't be this hard.
This is a terrible idea. Getting rid of testing doesn't make the problem (flakiness) go away, it just moves it to another part of workflow (manually testing). So, now instead of having tests, you have more humans (or because you're a small company, instead of building features which grow the company, you spend time manually testing and fixing regressions that your end users embarrassingly find for you). Never mind that it just doesn't scale as your codebase increases.
Even a basic level of (snapshot) testing react components is not difficult. I wrote a library [1] that intentionally has a ton of tests and over the years, I've been able to do new releases that upgrade to new versions of the underlying dependencies, without worry.
Seriously, write tests for the frontend.
I made a point of setting it up right from the beginning. Easy build system, fully unit tested, code of conduct, automated CLA signing, examples, good documentation and most importantly, I am excessively kind to anyone who comments or gives feedback. This took an inordinate amount of time up front, but was worth it.
I'd say the result of this is that I've gotten a couple high quality contributions, zero stress and very very little feedback. It has been a pleasure to maintain this project because it causes me no pain at all.
I'd say that maintaining 200+ projects is just insane really. You've overdone it. It is impossible to do any of them extremely well and of course you're just going to invite 200x more drama. Don't do that.
This is an example front-end react component project that I wrote that benefits heavily from tests: https://github.com/lookfirst/mui-rff
Why? Because it is a wrapper around two other frameworks (React Final Form and Material-UI). Any time those two frameworks change something in a way that I didn't expect, I want test failures.
I'm a fan of the Material-UI project which provides the visual components and ability to style them however you want. React Final Form is terrific with managing forms (and easily made very performant).
imho, these form components become really nice to work with...
Demo: https://lookfirst.github.io/mui-rff/
Codesandbox: https://codesandbox.io/s/react-final-form-material-ui-exampl...