I'm inheriting a react project that is built in 90% material UI. However, the designer is starting to take the design in another direction that doesn't seem to leverage much of material UI's fanciness.
FYI I've never used Material UI before, but I'm in a predicament on whether to use Material UI or not to build these next components because I feel like Material UI doesn't contribute anything to these new styles.
My colleague feels differently and feels like it adds a lot of built in components that we won't have to build ourselves. He feels that it makes it more maintainable to use battle tested Material UI components instead of throwing together our own.
I, on the other hand, feel like we will eventually be wrestling with the library more than we want to. I don't see how standard CSS and react components + tests can't do the same thing, with more flexibility too.
Pros of using it:
- Default styling out the box
- Less boilerplate
Cons of using it:
- Dependency on the Material styles
- Having to override things and wrestle with the framework
So my question is: what are signs that I don't need material UI? Should I just build using material ui as building blocks and override the styles? Or does it make more sense to build from scratch at that point?
To provide a concrete example, I'm supposed to build a responsive table that has expandable / collapsible rows and custom styling everywhere (basically it looks nothing like the default material ui table).