In other dev news: Learn React in the most hilarious way, Nuxt update increases stability, and the HTMHell Advent Calendar seeks submissions.
React Router was first released in November 2014 by Michael Jackson (not that M.J.) and Ryan Florence. At the time, most React developers were still figuring out how to handle navigation in single-page apps without resorting to low-level history manipulation. React Router provided a simple alternative. It lets you declare routes as JSX elements, which fit naturally into React's component model and way of thinking.
When I started researching, I found that there are solutions outside of Next.js, but they were either incomplete or tied to specific tools like Vite or esbuild. The more I dug, the more I realized that what we really have is a pattern without a proper implementation. It reminded me of Flux back in the day-a pattern that introduced new ideas but lacked clear direction on how those ideas should fit into existing applications.
React allows multiple updates to be batched together, which minimizes the number of render passes and significantly improves performance in applications. With this optimization, developers can create smoother and more efficient user interfaces by reducing the number of times components are rendered.