Summarize what you learned about React this week.  In your opinion, what the strengths and weaknesses of React. 

Admittedly, I have been using React professionally since 2017 so, almost a decade. So this course was a nice refresher for me.

In my opinion, React's biggest strength and weakness is ironically the same thing. Its flexibility. A developer can structure their react app in literally thousands of different and valid variations. And there are probably millions of invalid variations on top of that.

React components are just functions after all. But, they were not always that way. Originally, React components were class based. The classes made it easy to see the lifecycle a component had on the DOM. These class components were less elegant for sure but, they at least gave developers a chance at understanding what was going on underneath the hood.

Nowadays, developers (or AI agents) will just toss a ton of code in multiple `useEffect` calls to make API call. Then that component gets unmounted and re-mounted a couple hundred times per page load. Pages take longer to load and AWS bills climb higher.

But for those who understand the component life cycle and how to avoid prop drilling, React is a fantastic way to write front end code in a style that you want.