My workplace has both PHP and Node/React apps. PHP, instant result. The Node/React app takes 10 seconds at minimum to restart. Also, to start it for the first time takes a good minute or two. Annoying. Something no one else ever mentions is router systems. Everything under the sun uses router systems, even the PHP frameworks. Go ahead and benchmark those compared to just saving a file and having Apache or Nginx serve it because it's there. Go ahead, I'll wait. The router system is much slower. Not to mention, it has to be manually configured to even work.
People use router systems because file system can't map all the routes. Also, your web server also has a router system, it just happens that it, by default, maps /potato to potato.php (I like potato better than foo). Instead of configuring this, people tell the web server to forward all requests to a php based router so people so not have to rewrite routing logic when they switch web servers, and everything is configurable through one language.
This applies not only to php of course.
Also, I'm one of those guys who was lucky to do enterprise react projects before it was a thing, and even converted a huge react codebase to typescript, and I'm telling you: If it takes 10 seconds instead of 2 for a giant codebase, there's a misbehaving plugin or a misconfugiration. Shed all of them and also explore hot module reloading.
No one denies that. But this is another entry burden removed. Routing Systems are important and key to any framework. But explain the concept in the first day of a fresh Web Dev (w/o loosing him).
What kind of bloat do you have with your nodejs app?
My nodejs app (not react) restarts in about 3 seconds, which is still hugely annoying as I can hit reload after alt-tab in a second and I have to wait a few seconds or else I get "Bad Gateway" errors.
It's monitored by pm2 for auto restarting ts-node.
I wish there's a better solution that reloads faster than you can alt-tab and reload.
