⚛️ Fission as a Service

React. The name tells you everything. Not a noun. A command.

You don't act. You react. The framework sets the tempo and you respond to it. Your role is to describe what should happen when state changes — state you didn't choose, in a lifecycle you don't control, inside a reconciler you're not supposed to understand.

This is not an accident. It's a design. And like all designs, it encodes a relationship.

Facebook builds the tool. You build with the tool. The tool becomes the standard. The standard becomes the hiring signal. The hiring signal becomes the curriculum. The curriculum becomes the conference. The conference sells the ecosystem. The ecosystem runs on npm, which runs on packages, which run on dependencies, which run on more packages — a fractal of indirection that nobody audits and everybody ships.

Open source, they call it. And it is. The code is right there. But the code was never the product. The product is you. Once you're inside the React mental model — components, hooks, effects, memoization, server components, suspense boundaries — you are thinking in their grammar. You are not making choices. You are making the choices they left available.

The atom symbol is apt. They split the UI into the smallest possible pieces, then made reassembling them so complex that you need their toolchain to do it. Fission as a service.

Meanwhile the platform ships web components, popover, dialog, view transitions, CSS nesting, container queries. Every year the browser gets more capable and every year React adds another abstraction to insulate you from noticing.

React developers don't use the platform. They use React. That's the point. That's the entire point.