Honestly not the worst thing I’ve seen.

That’s what I used to think but it turns out to be the most Christian operator there is.

React basically figured out how to make XML work.

Remember, XML was actually designed for use cases like this, that’s why it came with XPath and XSLT, which let you make it executable in a sense by performing arbitrary transformations on an XML tree.

Back in the day, at my first coding job, we had an entire program that had a massive data model encoded in XML, and we used a bunch of XSL to programmatically convert that into Java objects, SQL queries, and HTML forms. Actually worked fairly well, except of course that XSL was an awful language to do that all in.

React simply figured out how to use JavaScript as the transformation language instead.

Actually, most of the weirdness comes from having been originally designed in a matter of 10 days by a single engineer working to accommodate a tight release schedule.

Probably no better or worse than any other ORM written in a more traditional language. Worst comes to worst, you can always escape to plain SQL.

TBF he probably had know way of knowing that the language he was creating would one day end up being as popular as it is now.

I guess the moral of the story is that you can never really predict what long term consequences your decisions might have down the road.