Why TanStack Query is overrated (and what to use instead)
I've been a TanStack Query user for two years. I wrote about it, recommended it to my team, and genuinely thought it was the final form of frontend data fetching.
Then I built a real product — a full-blown admin dashboard with forms, paginated lists, file uploads, polling, and cross-component communication.
That's when I realized: TanStack Query gives you a glorified fetcher and leaves all the complexity to you.
It's not that TanStack Query is bad. It's excellent at what it does: query caching, request deduplication, and background refetching. But in real-world application development, "fetching data" is only a fraction of what you actually need.
