Why Silicon Valley CTOS Are Ditching React in 2025

And why you might want to pay attention too…

Will React HoneyMoon Going to be Over?

React has been the dominant frontend framework for nearly a decade.

It is considered revolutionary in this era of web development with its component-based architecture, and has created a vast ecosystem of libraries and tools. However, a quiet shift is occurring behind the scenes at many top tech companies.

CTOs and engineering leaders are reassessing their long-term commitment to React and exploring alternatives — often without public announcements.

Opinions of CTO in Fintech Unicorn

Several factors that are making the CTO shift from React

Sandeep M., VP of Engineering at a fintech unicorn that processes over $2 billion in annual transactions, explained: “We went all-in on React in 2017. By 2021, we had a major application with over 200 developers working on it. That’s when the scaling problems became impossible to ignore.”

Although his company hasn’t completely abandoned React, they just stop expanding its footprint and are now exploring new technologies for different projects

The Common Patterns That Are Driving This Shift

Increasing Performance Issues with Increasing Engineering Investment

Lisa K., CTO at a Series-C productivity SaaS company, mentioned. “We’ve got a team of incredible React developers who’ve optimized everything they possibly can”.

“We’ve implemented virtualization, memoization, code splitting, server components — all of it. And we’re still hitting fundamental limits that are baked into React’s core design.”

An engineering director at a major e-commerce platform shared their internal metrics: “Our React frontend hits performance bottlenecks at around 60% of the interaction complexity of our native apps, despite having 3x the engineering investment.”

Increase in Meta-Work Problem

Increasing amount of developers’ time in understanding and implementing React-specific architectural patterns instead of focusing on business logic.

Omar J., CTO of a digital health startup, mentioned, “In 2016, React felt lightweight. You could be productive quickly,” “Now, to build a production-grade React application, my developers spend 60–70% of their time on React-specific patterns, configurations, and optimisation techniques instead of solving our actual business problems.”

The list of required knowledge is growing day by day

Complex state management strategies
Server components vs. client components
Error boundaries
Build tooling and configuration

One of the Engineering VP mentioned “We calculated that our React developers spend only about 30% of their time writing code that directly implements features. The rest is spent on the React meta-layer,”

Major Shifts in Framework

Over the years React System has been majorly shifted and each shift requires refactoring, retaining and often complete rewrites of shared libraries and patterns.

A CTO at a major marketplace platform revelead “We’ve spent over 40% of our frontend engineering budget since 2020 just keeping up with the React ecosystem’s evolutions rather than building new features.”

Another manager framed it more sharply: “We’re forced to constantly rebuild the foundation while trying to add more floors to the building.”

Where Are They Going Instead?

The most bothering concept is even if they are shifting from React where are they going, What are the alternatives?

Here’s some of the things they’re investing in

1. Using VanillaJS with Targeted Libraries

Shockingly, many companies are preferring VanillaJs

“We’ve stripped React out of our highest-traffic user flows and replaced it with vanilla JavaScript using small, focused libraries for specific needs,” said the CTO of a streaming service. “Our page load times dropped by 60% and our conversion rates improved by 14%.”

Several mentioned Lit, Alpine.js, and Petite-Vue as lightweight alternatives for adding reactivity only where needed.

2. Compiler-Focused Frameworks

As seen, Svelte and Solidjs are coming as an emerging choice

“We rebuilt our account management portal with Svelte after struggling with React performance. The same team delivered the project in half the time, and the performance is dramatically better,” shared a VP of Engineering at a cloud infrastructure company.

3. Following Islands Architecture

Separating interactive components from the static one to gain performance improvements

“We’re using Astro for most of our marketing and content sites now. We only use React for the complex interactive components, which is maybe 20% of our frontend,” explained the CTO of a content platform.

4. Internal UI Libraries

Some of the companies are focusing on building lightweight alternatives which has been more viable because of the rise of compiler tools like SWC

“We’ve created an internal UI framework that’s specifically optimised for our use cases. It’s about 20% of the size of React, with vastly better performance characteristics for what we need,” shared a principal engineer at a streaming company.

Is React Dying? Nope. But Its Role Is Definitely Shifting.

Let’s clear one thing up — React isn’t going anywhere.
But it’s not the “default for everything” anymore either.

Think of it like this: React used to be the one-size-fits-all tool. Now? It’s becoming more of a “use-it-where-it-makes-sense” kind of thing.

A CTO recently (let’s call him James), and he said,

“We still use React for dashboards and internal stuff — but we’ve stopped using it for user-facing apps where performance really matters.”

Another engineering lead put it perfectly:

“React was built for the challenges we had 5–10 years ago. We’re solving new problems now.”

And honestly? That shift makes total sense.

What’s Your Experience

I’ve shared some of the conversations of engineering leaders in Silicon Valley, but I also would love to hear your thoughts and how your experience has been so far.
Drop your experience in the comments below.👇

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