Why Drupal’s Front-End Is Better Off Without Ember, Says Matthew Radcliffe

In a frank post, Matthew Radcliffe outlines how Ember’s reactivity model often fails to trigger component updates even when using @tracked properties and documented patterns. He describes scenarios where state is updated via services, such as updateState() in MyService, but components like MyComponent fail to re-render.

Frustrated by the lack of a reliable lifecycle in Ember, Radcliffe notes that even getter-based accessors to tracked service properties don’t reliably trigger updates. The experience has left him “pining for Angular” and grateful that Drupal never adopted Ember. In his view, Drupal’s API-first, framework-agnostic approach has aged far better than locking into a rigid front-end framework like Ember—especially in complex environments like Discourse.