I'm a React developer at a large company working on an enterprise application which draws on a large amount of data, but performs a very specialized task and has only a handful of internal users. The entire front end is to be built in React, and I am the only dedicated front end developer on the project.
Our unofficial lead back end dev has expressed a desire to implement a micro-frontend design pattern. I had little knowledge of this pattern, and have spent the last few weeks reading about it and creating a simple proof of concept. What I've learned has soured me on the idea a great deal, and I tried to raise my concerns to my colleague but he still wants to move forward, and scheduled a meeting to present the issue to management and an architect for discussion. I'm a new contractor, and as a senior dev he has much more sway than me.
The primary benefits of such a pattern are that it allows multiple teams to independently deploy separate "micro-apps" within a single application, and enjoy greater autonomy in their workflow as well as freedom to use different stacks to solve their problems. However, far from having multiple teams, our project has only a single FE developer--me, and I discovered quickly that this, naturally, will mean maintaining maybe a dozen different apps, updating a dozen sets of dependencies, and building/deploying certain changes a dozen different times. In addition, everything will be built in React, so there is no need to account for separate frameworks.
From this article:
Some of the benefits are lost when there is only one small team working on the web application. In fact, the overhead created by micro frontends makes it harder for a team to manage components. A developer would have to switch to a different coding and deployment practice for each component slice they work on, which results in context switching and slower development.
To make matters worse, it makes me unable to use a proven, industry standard solution like Redux or the Context API to manage global state traditionally, as I cannot import contexts between apps. Maintaining multiple Redux stores would be complicated and counter-intuitive as a single source of truth. He's recommended emitting custom events, however he is not experienced in front end development, and this does not seem practical:
When a child component wants to communicate to a parent or sibling component, it makes sense to dispatch custom browser events. However, DOM events require more work when using React.
React uses its own event system and cannot directly listen for native DOM events coming from a Custom Element.
These are big and difficult problems, and as the only resident FE dev it will fall on me to find solutions to them, which could halt my productivity dead in its tracks and detract from my ability to solve problems we absolutely must, like performance in managing millions of records. He argues that this is a business critical application, and using this pattern will ensure it is able to scale if, in several years' time, it begins growing exponentially and ultimately needs to be maintained by multiple teams. I am still new here, and I don't know how plausible such massive growth is, but it seems unlikely as it is not planned for and the app performs a highly specific function. I don't believe it's worth exposing ourselves to increased complexity, slower/more development time and a host of liabilities that could put us months behind schedule (when business has already pressured us about our trajectory) in exchange for abstract benefits in theoretical scaling years down the road.
I believe other proposed benefits like modularity and separation of concerns can be accomplished in React by simply creating a thoughtful component model, which could situate views in their own self-sufficient component trees and contain errors with error boundaries.
In your opinion, are there real benefits to this pattern I'm not seeing? Am I letting my anxiety over doing something new cloud my judgment, or are my concerns as well-founded as I believe they are? If so, how can I convince leadership that this not the correct solution for our situation?
