Why Redux 'Ducks' Failed and What It Reveals About Frontend State Management

A deep-dive essay in the 'Inglorious Web' series revisits the Redux 'ducks' convention, proposed by Erik Rasmussen, which aimed to bundle reducers, action types, and action creators into portable, reusable modules. The idea never gained widespread traction, partly because most application logic is too domain-specific to reuse, and partly because Redux reducers must remain pure, leaving impure concerns like browser APIs and subscriptions to live outside the store. React hooks and Vue composables later filled that gap by pairing impure logic with component lifecycles, enabling libraries like VueUse and react-use to offer genuinely portable utilities. However, this solution came at the cost of fragmentation, splitting business state and browser state across different mental models, testing strategies, and locations in a codebase. The article argues this architectural split represents a deeper, unresolved tension in frontend state management that persists to this day.