I enjoyed working with backbone. It was a breath of fresh air back in the day.
I've actually ported it to C++ and Java (implementing an Event emitter for both languages).
And I respect Jeremy, also the author of coffee script, the most expressive language which I also enjoyed working with.
Scaling such a lib for the entire universe and maintaining it is probably quite complicated without strong financial backing, but maybe not all projects are supposed to be scaled.
I still like hacking together quick one-page apps with Backbone, it's too easy to do, although I have to admit that React is much more powerful - in theory.
For many, though, Backbone can still be a very good choice.
I also greatly respect Jeremy for the work he's done on Backbone, CoffeeScript, and Underscore.
I'm confused by his stance on versioning, however: he's very much against semver, which means these tools can be tricky to use with npm (which assumes all packages follow semver).
And I respect Jeremy, also the author of coffee script, the most expressive language which I also enjoyed working with.
Scaling such a lib for the entire universe and maintaining it is probably quite complicated without strong financial backing, but maybe not all projects are supposed to be scaled.
I still like hacking together quick one-page apps with Backbone, it's too easy to do, although I have to admit that React is much more powerful - in theory.
For many, though, Backbone can still be a very good choice.