React state management in 2026: the boring answer

#react#javascript

Most apps need less state than they have, and a store is rarely the missing piece.

The first version worked, which is exactly why it was hard to see how wrong it was. Everything looked fine in the demo, and everything looked fine until traffic arrived on a Tuesday afternoon and the graph started doing something I'd never seen before.

Context

I want to be honest about the trade-offs here. The approach I settled on solves the problem I had, not every problem of this shape, and there is a clear point where you should reach for something more heavy-duty.

Tools matter less than the feedback loop they enable. A fast, boring loop beat every sophisticated setup I tried, and I've kept it ever since, even as the rest of the stack changed twice over.

[deploy]
strategy = "rolling"
healthcheck = "/healthz"
max_unavailable = 1

The plan

The numbers below are from my own machine and my own workload. Treat them as a method, not a benchmark: the point is how the measurement was taken, not the exact figures it produced.

What surprised me most was how small the final change was. Most of the work was understanding the problem precisely enough that the fix became obvious, and that understanding took far longer than the fix itself.

A destructive or irreversible operation.

What shipped

What surprised me most was how small the final change was. Most of the work was understanding the problem precisely enough that the fix became obvious, and that understanding took far longer than the fix itself.

There is a version of this article that opens with theory. I decided against it, because the theory is easy to find and the motivation is not — so let's start with the thing that actually broke.

  • Read the error message twice before changing anything
  • Reproduce it with the smallest input you can
  • Write the failing test first, even if it feels ceremonial
  • Only then reach for the fix

Follow-ups

What surprised me most was how small the final change was. Most of the work was understanding the problem precisely enough that the fix became obvious, and that understanding took far longer than the fix itself.

I want to be honest about the trade-offs here. The approach I settled on solves the problem I had, not every problem of this shape, and there is a clear point where you should reach for something more heavy-duty.

By the end of this post you should be able to reproduce the whole thing yourself in under an hour, including the parts I got wrong the first time — those are marked so you can skip them if you're in a hurry.