React vs. Backbone in 2025
15 Years of Progress Look at the two implementations above. The code is roughly the same length. They do exactly the same thing. One was written with a framework from 2010, the other with a framework that’s had countless developer hours and a massive ecosystem behind it for over a decade. The interesting part is not how much better React is—it’s how little progress we’ve actually made. The Illusion of Simplicity React looks cleaner. It reads better at first glance. But that readability comes at a cost: you’re trading explicit simplicity for abstraction complexity. The Backbone code is brutally honest about what it’s doing. An event fires, a handler runs, you build some HTML, you put it in the DOM. It’s verbose, sure, but there’s no mystery. A junior developer can trace exactly…
