React and Remix Choose Different Futures

Summary

Bryan Cantrill's talk Platform as a Reflection of Values gave me a lens I didn't know I needed. When platforms diverge, he argued, it's rarely about technical merit. It's about values misalignment. The things that matter most to one community simply rank differently for another. I attended Remix Jam two weeks ago, then spent this past week watching React Conf 2025 videos. I have spent the last decade shipping production code on React and the last two years on Remix. Now both ecosystems are shifting, and what seemed like different approaches has become incompatible visions. React Conf's technical announcements were incremental: React 19.2 APIs, View Transitions experiments, the compiler getting more sophisticated. The message was clear: React is listening to the community while accepting complexity on your behalf. Stability, Composability, Capability: those are the values. The Remix team announced something else entirely: they're breaking with React. The mental model shifts introduced by use client and the implementation complexity of Server Components forced a choice. And Remix 3 chose Simplicity. Remix 2 users pay the price; there's no upgrade path. That choice, to sacrifice Stability for Simplicity, makes explicit what was already true: these values cannot coexist. React's Values: Complexity as Capability React's stated goal is to "raise the bar for responsive user experience." At React Conf 2025, the team demonstrated what that means in practice. They will accept tremendous complexity on developers' behalf if it delivers better experiences for end users. The React Compiler is the clearest example. It analyzes your code, breaks components into smaller pieces of logic, and automatically optimizes rendering. In Meta's Quest store app, they saw 12% faster load times and interactions that were twice as fast, even though the app was already hand-optimized. The compiler isn't replacing developer skill; it's handling complexity that would be unrealistic to maintain manua...