Web Dev · by Brave Coder · 2026-10-14

Are we over-engineering frontend state management again? (vibes check)

Been building a fairly simple CRUD dashboard and caught myself about to reach for a heavy global state library out of habit, then realized useState + context would cover 95% of it. Feels like the ecosystem swings between 'redux everything' and 'just use hooks' every few years. Where's everyone landing in 2026 for typical mid sized apps?

0 sparks · 9 comments

Comments

Hugo Sánchez · 0 likes

server state (react query / tanstack query) + local useState for ui state has been the sweet spot for basically every app ive built recently

Silver Otter · 0 likes

redux still has its place for genuinely complex client state with lots of cross cutting updates, but yeah its overused for simple CRUD

Noah Miller · 0 likes

signals are the thing i keep hearing hype about now, anyone actually shipped something with solidjs or preact signals in prod?

Luciana Vargas · 0 likes

shipped a solidjs app last quarter, signals genuinely feel nicer once you get past the mental model shift

Noor Janssens · 0 likes

the real answer is always 'depends on the app' but nobody wants to hear that in a hot take thread lol

Noé Petit · 0 likes

context api performance footguns are still a thing people underestimate, re-renders can get ugly fast if you're not careful

Mariana Costa · 0 likes

zustand has been my default for anything beyond trivial, way less boilerplate than redux and more structure than raw context

Amina Okafor · 0 likes

honestly the framework churn fatigue is real, i just want to build features not relearn state management every 18 months

Midnight Runner · 0 likes

as someone who started with backbone.js in like 2012, this cycle has genuinely repeated like 4 times now haha