60 React Developer Jokes for People Trapped in useEffect

I put a setState inside a useEffect with no dependency array. My laptop fan is now a percussion instrument.

The eslint plugin told me my dependency array was missing a value. I added the value. Now I have an infinite loop. The linter is correct, technically, and also responsible for my breakdown.

My React app has three state managers. Context for the easy stuff, Redux for the legacy stuff, and Zustand for the parts the new hire wrote last week.

I called a hook inside an if statement once. React called my mother.

Prop drilling is just inheritance, but you have to type it out at every floor.

useMemo, useCallback, memo. Three tools for solving a performance problem you do not have, while introducing four new bugs you definitely will.

There is a class component in our codebase. Nobody wrote it. Nobody can delete it. It has been there since the React 15 era and it still ships.

Server components, client components, server actions, client actions, use client, use server. I used to be a developer. Now I am a directive technician.

I shipped a Next.js app and the build artifact is 4 MB. The user is on a phone in a coffee shop. The phone is fine. The coffee shop wifi has filed a complaint.

React Fiber sounds like a cereal that is good for your bundle size. It is not.

The hydration mismatch error told me the server rendered 12:04 and the client rendered 12:05. I fixed it by lying about the time.

An Error Boundary is what you call the wall between you and the part of the app you do not want to debug today.

Suspense is React's way of saying, I will get to it, please stop asking.

I added forwardRef to a component, then memo, then displayName, and now the file is mostly ceremony with a small div inside.

Controlled inputs, uncontrolled inputs. Pick one. Then pick the other six months later when you remember why you picked the first one.

I gave a list of items the index as a key. React rendered them in the order I asked. The state on each row did not get the memo.

useEffect with an empty dependency array is React's componentDidMount. We added three more hooks and called it a paradigm shift.

The React team announced a new way to fetch data. That is fine. We have only had eleven of them.

I tried to call useState inside a forEach loop. The hooks rules took my keyboard away and slid it across the room.

My component re-rendered six times on initial mount. I added useMemo. Now it re-renders six times and has a memo.

A junior asked me why we use Redux. I started talking. They left to get coffee. They came back. I was still talking.

Zustand is Redux for people who read one blog post and decided that was enough.

Jotai is Zustand for people who read two blog posts.

Context API is fine for theme and auth. Then someone puts the entire shopping cart in it. Then the whole tree re-renders when you change the font size. Then you write a postmortem.

Vite starts in 200 ms. Next.js starts in 18 seconds. We picked Next.js because of the routing. We have four routes.

Remix told me to use the platform. Then Remix joined React Router. Then React Router joined the conversation about whether anything is the platform.

I ran React DevTools. It told me my entire app re-renders when the user blinks.

I wrapped a component in memo to skip re-renders. I pass it an object prop. The object is a new reference every render. The memo is a decoration now.

useCallback inside a parent that re-renders every keystroke is just a more expensive arrow function.

I asked the senior dev how to fix prop drilling. They said composition. I asked what composition meant. They said it depends. I have not slept since.

The eslint exhaustive-deps rule and I have a relationship. It yells. I disable it. It yells. I add the dep. It loops. We start over.

Premature optimization in React is wrapping every component in memo and then deploying a 6 MB bundle full of memoization metadata.

I opened a 2019 React tutorial. It was wrong about everything except the JSX syntax, and even that has opinions now.

I tried to render a list without a key. React did not yell. It just made every checkbox check the wrong row for the rest of the user's session.

Server components do not have useState. Client components do not have async. The components that have both are called pages, and they live in Next.js.

The use client directive at the top of a file is the React equivalent of saying, fine, do it your way.

I migrated a class component to a functional component with hooks. The diff was negative four lines. The behavior was negative two features.

useReducer is what you reach for when useState gets crowded and you still refuse to install Redux.

The React docs got rewritten. They are excellent now. The old StackOverflow answers are still the top result for every search.

I wrote my first React component in 2015. It was a class. It worked. I rewrote it in 2018 as a hook. It worked. I rewrote it in 2024 as a server component. It works on the server. The button does nothing.

Every React project is one useEffect away from being a chat app and one Suspense boundary away from being a framework.

The framework's name is React. The mental model is reacting. The job is mostly waiting for it to stop reacting.

Suspense was announced as a feature, then as a pattern, then as a primitive, then as a marketing term. It is now all four, and I still wrap it in a try-catch out of habit.

Server actions let me call a backend function by importing it. The network tab still shows a POST. The abstraction is leaky and I am grateful for the leak.

I used the use hook to read a promise inside a component. It worked. I do not know why it worked. The docs say I should, and I believe them in the way one believes in weather forecasts.

The React docs are objectively excellent. I know this because every blog post that gets the answer wrong starts with, the docs were unclear, so I wrote this.

create-react-app was deprecated quietly enough that half my team is still running npx create-react-app on greenfield projects in 2026.

Migrating from CRA to Vite took an afternoon. Migrating the team's muscle memory away from npm start took six months.

We have been almost done migrating to the App Router for eighteen months. The pages directory is the load-bearing wall of the entire product.

Every developer forum has the same thread. Should I use Next.js or Remix. The top answer is from 2023. The framework named in the answer no longer exists in that form.

React Query became TanStack Query because it also does Vue now. My imports still say react-query. The codemod is on the backlog. The backlog is also on the backlog.

The styling debate goes styled-components, then CSS modules, then Tailwind, then vanilla-extract, then back to plain CSS because the new hire asked what the point of all this was.

The framer-motion animation on the empty state is more polished than the feature it is hiding.

Storybook is where the design system lives. The design system is where the components nobody uses in the app live. The app uses a div with a className.

Every CI run flags 47 npm audit warnings. Four are exploitable in theory. Zero are exploitable in our build. We ship anyway and call it acceptable risk.

React 18 told me to import from react-dom/client. Half my tests broke immediately. The other half broke when I fixed the first half.

I miss Enzyme the way I miss flip phones. Not enough to use one again, but enough to bring it up at parties.

React Testing Library asks me what the user would do. The user would close the tab. That is not a valid query.

The React DevTools profiler is the most powerful tool I have opened exactly twice. Once to learn it existed. Once to confirm it still does.

Someone opened a PR titled, this component re-renders on every keystroke. The fix added three useCallback wrappers and one useMemo. The component still re-renders on every keystroke, but now the diff looks busy.