Is React 18 overhyped?

As a front-end developer, you must have come across articles titled as follows :

1. What’s new in React 18?
2. Should you learn React 18?
3. React18: Features and updates
4. The Complete Guide to React 18
5. React 18 will change front-end development.
6. Okay, 5th one was made-up…!!

All I’m trying to say, blog authors have done their best to draw awareness towards the upcoming release of React 18. My question is, “Does it worth it?”

To answer that, we will see “What’s new in React 18?” according to the official plan.

1. Automatic batching for fewer renders
2. New API: startTransition
3. New Suspense SSR Architecture

1. Automatic batching

Till React 17, the only event listeners have the feature of arranging multiple setState.

A piece of code is worth a thousand words.

From React 18 it will support inside of timeouts, promises, native event handlers or any other event will batch the same way as updates inside of React events.

What if I don’t want this feature?

2. startTransition

Suppose,

1. You’ve got an input element that causes an `onChange` event
2. The value gets updated.
3. On value change, you fire a query for data
4. Render the result on the screen.

It looks shallow but if we see rendering cycle and performance it may cause issues on slow environments depending on the computations going on such as animations and transitions and more interactive UI transactions.

In this case, some of us might have used throttling or debouncing or setTimeout but that doesn't stop the query from performing heavy UI renders.