Absoltely Lara Laurielle ! That slow down you feel is because somewhere along the line a short cut was likely taken without discussing the tradeoffs of doing so.

Experience. I've worked in the world of waterfall, agile and everything in between. I love the speed of agile, but it comes with too much ceremony. I love the planning of waterfall, but it mired by change requests and slow development processes. I feel good software always has a good plan. Not everything needs to be laid out in the beginning to be successful, but there needs to be discussions on directions and tradeoffs. I've worked in enough industries and seen software build in many different ways. The best outcomes usually stem from the same place. They all start with good architecture decisions.

That is a very keen insight! I definitely agree. I like the freedom of React if everyone is on the same page on how to build an application, but without alignment on development strategy things can get messy quick. Especially in larger applications where teams might be being separately of each other. Dependency drift can be a difficult problem to wrangle once applications are live.