In this interview, I sat down with Dan Abramov to talk about where React has been, where it’s going, and why the conversation around React Server Components has gotten… honestly, pretty low quality. Dan shares what he’s been up to (including stepping back after burnout, writing again on Overreacted, and even using Claude as a “hype man” to unblock drafts). We also get into how he thinks about writing: letting go of audience expectations, backtracking when you go in the wrong direction, and treating articles more like structured proofs built from small “lemmas.” On the React side, the big takeaway is this: React Server Components are widely misunderstood. Dan’s biggest frustration is people arguing against a version of the tech that isn’t real—especially the idea that “server components = server rendering.” He frames RSC more like componentizing the API layer: what if your server could return React trees, not just JSON, so you avoid client-side waterfalls and simplify the client. We also talk about React’s increasing surface area—Suspense, boundaries, caching—and why Dan sees that complexity as a good trade when it makes user code more declarative and pushes the hard parts into React itself.