It’s 3 AM. You’ve just shipped a feature. The logic is sound, the tests pass, but the UI feels… heavy. Input fields lag by a fraction of a second. Animations stutter on mobile devices. You check your network tab—it’s clean. You check your bundle size—it’s optimized.
The era of “janky” user interfaces is officially over. In the landscape of 2025, users—and their high-refresh-rate displays—have zero tolerance for blocked main threads. If your dashboard stutters when a user types into a filter input, you aren’t just losing frames; you’re losing trust.
If you’ve been writing React for the better part of a decade, you know the drill. You write a component, you realize a child is re-rendering unnecessarily, and you begrudgingly wrap a callback in useCallback or a calculation in useMemo. We’ve spent years micromanaging dependency arrays and fighting the “rules of hooks.”
