Where possible, we try to stick with the popular choice for our tools. There's a lot of value in sticking to defaults. We only stray away from them when we have a really good reason. In the case of Laravel (and Inertia), the popular choice would be Vue, but we've landed on React. Why? Story time!
After the jQuery glory days, we jumped on the React bandwagon because Jeffrey Way shared a React course on Laracasts. It was a huge transition from plain JavaScript, but we were happy with it. About a year later, Vue exploded in the Laravel community. From a technical perspective, React and Vue were both great options, so we decided to pivot to Vue. Following the herd makes it easier to consume and share knowledge from and with others. Third party packages are more likely to use the popular choice, making integrations easier.
We used Vue for a few years, but slowly outgrew it through a series of small annoyances in reactivity and composition. In the mean time, movements in the React ecosystem had us hooked and we considered moving back. These arguments alone weren't worth the switch. We'd be straying away from Laravel's de facto frontend framework, and the grass always looks greener on the other side. The problems we had in Vue might not exist in React, but React comes with its own quirks.
Suddenly TypeScript appeared with a huge promise. A strongly typed frontend eradicates an entire class of potential bugs. It makes refactoring safer and maintaining a large codebase easier. The developer experience and type safety of React and TypeScript was leaps and bounds ahead of Vue's offering. While the gap has gotten smaller over time, we consider React and TypeScript to be the stronger duo. Paired with the extensive React ecosystem of composable and headless UI tools like Radix, we decided to make the switch.
We prefer to follow the community as often as possible. But when our off beat choices have a huge impact on our productivity and happiness, we're not afraid to shy away from the defaults.
