Is React.js still worth learning in 2023?
Tags: react, webdev
Published: 2023-02-26 10:54:48

React.js is meta backed javascript library, and today it's considered as the most widely used javascript library. But increasingly most folks(well tech twitter) have been referencing it as being dead, and that it's rather worth learning other libraries/framework over it. Well the energy and perspectives of folks on social media can be quite misleading at times, so it's best to always look at the real numbers/metrics before taking your decision.

So I'll try to do a comprehensive study based on two very important criteria, you should always consider before learning a new technology. These metrics are going to be **community & ecosystem**, and **job market & talent**. With these we can take a reasonable conclusion based on the numbers rather than following folks' perspectives blindly.

## 1. Community & Ecosystem
> In my opinion the community & ecosystem of a tech stack is the most thing to consider before learning it. No one likes the feeling of surfing through google for countless hours and not finding a solution to his/her problem. That's the effect of having a poor community.

React.js since it's introduction back in 2013 has grown so much in popularity. It's concept of building UI in terms of component has largely been adopted by the front end industry, and as of now react.js has one of the larges communities out there. You can basically see responses to entry entry level problem you encounter with the library by just hopping stack over flow. 

Here are two very important 2022 surveys. The first conducted by stack over flow, and here we can clearly see how react.js tops the charts in terms of the libraries used by both professionals and those learning to code.
 
{% embed https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/#most-popular-technologies-webframe %}

The second survey was conducted by the state of javascript. Yet again React.js tops the charts for the used library on the front end. 

[https://2022.stateofjs.com/en-US/libraries/front-end-frameworks/](https://2022.stateofjs.com/en-US/libraries/front-end-frameworks/)

With that we can start to see how large the React ecosystem presently is.

## 2. Job market & talent
If you are someone like me trying to make a living as a software engineer then this definetly is an important metrics to consider. 
I took a look at the number of jobs in demand on upwork(the world's leading freelance platform) for react, angular, vue, svelte developers. Here's what I came out with.

| Tech stack | Number of jobs |
|------------|--------------- |
| React.js   | 5,768          |
| Vue.js     | 1,173          |
| Angular    | 1,589          |
| Svelte     | 311            |

Clearly React.js developers are very much in need, the gap is mind blowing.

Taking those these metrics into consideration more specifically the ecosystem & community we can clearly see that react.js is still very must alive. Infact the majority of new framework/libraries out there now like Solid, Preact are some what derivatives of react.js

So if you're considering learning to code in 2023, then the numbers are up, now the decision is up to you. Until the next time