The React Component Pyramid Scheme: An Over-Engineering Crisis
The obsession with reusable React components has led to over-engineering, complexity and unmaintainable code.
The mantra of “reusability” turned from a best practice into a full-blown theology. Every team has that one engineer preaching the gospel of The Ultimate Component — the one that can handle every layout, color scheme and edge case with a dozen optional props and 500 lines of conditionals.
What began as a noble goal of cleaner architecture has metastasized into a codebase where every file imports every other file, and no one dares touch the base component for fear of breaking the entire app. This isn’t code reuse; it’s dependency debt dressed up as virtue.
We crave patterns that make us feel like we’ve transcended the chaos of ad-hoc coding. DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself) became one of those sacred principles — a simple idea mutated into dogma.
Alexander T. Williams
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At some point, we stopped writing React components and started worshiping them.
Original Title: The React Component Pyramid Scheme: An Over-Engineering Crisis
Author: Alexander T. Williams