How Tech Stack Choices Create Technical Debt in Frontend

Every codebase gets messy eventually. Tight deadlines, weird product decisions and changing tools make it worse. That’s how technical debt starts.

Technical debt doesn’t mean bad code. Sometimes you do it on purpose to hit a deadline or ship a feature fast. The real problem is when no one keeps track of it and it quietly grows out of control.

Most frontend teams can’t scale a project without taking on some debt. Business changes fast and there is never enough time to do it all perfectly. Here’s why this happens:

• Deadlines rule everything. When you are under pressure, clean code turns into “let’s just get it working.” And that’s usually how debt begins.
• Some business wise decisions are just complex. Like “give points when users order, but take them back if it’s returned unless it was a promo.” These kinds of rules make the code harder, even if you write them cleanly.
• Big codebases are hard to keep clean. New developers join, don’t know the context and instead of cleaning things up, they just patch things on top.
• What looks like a great choice today might trap you tomorrow. AngularJS is a great example of that. It was everywhere until Google dropped support and everyone had to rebuild from scratch.

Since avoiding technical debt completely is unrealistic, one of the most effective ways to minimize it is making informed technology choices. The frameworks and libraries we pick today can either reduce our future workload or create unnecessary maintenance problems.

Why Your Rendering Strategy Can Make or Break a Project

Choosing a framework with a small community or limited adoption carries significant risk. The right tool does not mean the most technically advanced or best performing tool. It means the tool that ensures the long term sustainability of the project.

The Impact of Rendering Choices

If you pick the wrong rendering model, you are stuck with:

• SEO
• Performance issues
• Third-party scripts
• Over-engineering

Rendering isn’t just a technical detail. It defines how your product performs and how users experience it.

Why React Remains the Most Practical Choice

If you are building an SPA, React is still the most suitable choice. Others might have technical wins but React wins in the long term:

• Huge ecosystem.
• Easier hiring.
• Better chance someone’s already solved your weird edge case.

People love to complain about React (including me): it’s too slow, the bundles are huge and everything re-renders for no reason. But in most real-world apps, these are solvable:

• React 19’s compiler helps with performance issues.
• Bundle size? Tree-shaking and code-splitting are your friends.
• Rerenders? That’s usually a state management issue. Instead of lifting state too high and flooding components with props, move logic into custom hooks where it belongs.

Understanding the Trade-offs in Framework Selection

Say you pick Solid.js instead of React. On paper, it’s faster and has fine grained reactivity. But that decision comes with long term risks that most people don’t consider.

• Small ecosystem
• Limited community

Picking a tech stack isn’t about what’s exciting right now. It’s about what won’t bite you later.