php or react?

so i hate react, because it's an framework.

i'm a developer, that's kind of obvious, since i built a website, but i hate using any frameworks - as i said, i like doing things my own way. i hate when i'm dependent on something i don't control.

you could say: "react will not fail since it is maintained by a big company and is used by many developers", but... PHP was also used by many developers. what's now? everyone is switching to react from PHP. they're running from php like it's radioactive. anyways that's a point of making websites - move yourself outside these big techs, regulating your every single move. why do a big company should regulate react?

and my first programming language was... php. i started learning it a short time after html, probably also after css. i rembember that i tried saving html file as dot php and viewing in browser, thinking it will work. i learned batch before, but it was a shell script, not a programming language.

but then... javascript and jsx exploded with popularity with react. i ignored that and i was still making websites in php - and i have to argue that i have never created better website's backend than my attempts in php. i was using reusable code like make('header') etc.

but react has components... right? personally, i did not found react components as simple and useful as php's functions, containing ?>, html code and <?php.

i've tried next.js, it's an framework based on React. it has components and i don't know what else in next.js is better than in react. the first thing i noticed was that react and react-based frameworks were something different for me. jsx looked like a wrong syntax. after all > and < in moder languages are operators used to compare something to something. xml-like syntax within javascript looked like total mess to me.

php is also installed once somewhere on the OS and react... you have multiple copies of it - for every single project using react you have to store a copy in every single node_modules.

additionally... the whole structure in react is a mess. if you want to change it - try to find it in the endless documentation. in php you create structure like you want it to be. if you want to support (comment) folders - just create a htaccess and a simple router. no one tells you how your project should look like in php - in react you often have to create folders like app, components, core, node_modules, dist, src, etc.

php is an frontend and a backend in one language. if you want to get something from post and display a different page based on it - okay it's simple. on react - you have to maintain a frontend (react or react-based) and a backend (express, nest.js, node.js built in http server, ws). no simple connections. want your backend to display a temporary page while processing? backend, not frontend. you have to write your own code once again - you have to duplicate code.

this opinion is subjective, but i guess that php is not dying, just more and more developers use trendy tools without analyzing what's better. many people just write in react because they learned this from a random, 13-hour long react tutorial - without having their own, researched opinion.

if you think i missed something, let me know on guestbook (or chat, but since many people can spam messages, i have less chance to see it).