// the find
gaearon/react-makes-you-sad
Here’s a flowchart to make you happy again!
A flowchart by Dan Abramov (React core team) that walks you through why you're frustrated with React and points you toward the right solution. It was a reaction to 'JavaScript fatigue' circa 2016, when the React ecosystem felt like a maze of mandatory tooling decisions. A single SVG decision tree.
Created at a moment when this diagnosis was genuinely needed and the author had real authority to give the advice. The flowchart format is appropriate — it matches how the confusion actually manifests, as a sequence of wrong turns. Linked resources (react-howto, Thinking in React) were the correct recommendations at the time.
Abandoned in 2016 — the ecosystem it describes (Flux, early Redux, Babel confusion) is almost unrecognizable now. The SVG lives on a CDN URL (rawgit.com) that has since shut down, so the main artifact is broken. This is a historical artifact, not something you'd point a new React developer at today.