What I Stopped Doing in React Projects (and Why My Code Got Better)

I spent months building a production React platform that manages campaigns, customer conversations, and permissions across multiple organizations. Somewhere around the third month, I realized the code wasn't getting worse because I was doing too little — it was getting worse because I was doing too much. Writing maintainable React code isn't about following best practices. It's about knowing which practices to stop following. Here are five things I eliminated, and the measurable improvements that followed. 1. I Stopped Using Redux for Server State Before: 200 Lines of Boilerplate Every time I needed to fetch data from an API, I wrote code like this: // 3 action types, 1 action creator, 1 reducer, 2 selectors... const FETCH_CAMPAIGNS_REQUEST = "FETCH_CAMPAIGNS_REQUEST"; const FETCH_CAMPAIGNS_SUCCESS = "FETCH_CAMPAIGNS_SUCCESS"; const FETCH_CAMPAIGNS_FAILURE = "FETCH_CAMPAIGNS_FAILURE"; export const fetchCampaigns = (page) => async (dispatch) => { dispatch({ type: FETCH_CAMPAIGNS_R