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The Death of the UI Kit

Pranay Kothapalli
Pranay Kothapalli

Maintainer at Rad UI

3 min read
Frontend ArchitectureHeadlessuiRadixuiDesignsystemsRadui

Why bloated UI kits like Material and Chakra are dying relics — and how composable, accessible primitives are reshaping modern frontends.

The Death of the UI Kit

UI kits once ruled frontend land. They promised instant polish, fast prototyping, and a unified design language — until teams tried to scale with them. Then the seams showed.

Material UI, Chakra, Ant Design — all great in isolation, but drop one into a serious product and watch entropy unfold. Suddenly you’re fighting your own dependencies, overriding inline styles with !important, and explaining to a designer why changing a border radius needs a full theme rebuild.

The Illusion of Speed

UI kits feel fast — the way duct tape feels like a repair. You can slap together a dashboard in an afternoon. But once you hit production velocity, you pay in bundle size, overrides, and context leaks.

The numbers don’t lie:

  • Material UI adds roughly 150–200 KB of JS and CSS to even simple apps.
  • Chakra UI ships over 120 components, whether you use them or not.
  • Each theme tweak multiplies runtime CSS variables, killing render performance on lower-end devices.

You ship fast. You slow down forever.

The Great Override Apocalypse

Every UI kit user eventually faces the override wall. You need one variant the library didn’t account for — maybe a ghost button with custom focus states — and the theming API starts groaning.

Then you’re deep inside sx props, custom theme providers, or worse, global CSS overrides. Your codebase becomes a museum of "temporary fixes" and "don’t touch this" comments.

The irony? You’re writing more CSS than if you’d started from scratch.

Design Systems Broke the Model

Modern teams don’t need prefab UI kits — they need primitives. Small, composable, accessible components that adapt to your design language, not the other way around.

Radix UI started this movement. Headless UI libraries like Rad UI extend it — giving you the logic, accessibility, and structure, without opinionated styling.

This shifts ownership back to where it belongs: your design system, not a third-party brand’s idea of one.

The Future: Primitives Over Presets

The next generation of UI architecture isn’t about copying Material Design; it’s about building your own system on a foundation of rock-solid, reusable behavior.

Primitives give you:

  • Predictability: No hidden styling layers.
  • Accessibility by default: ARIA, focus management, keyboard navigation built-in.
  • Performance: Smaller bundles, fewer runtime dependencies.
  • Freedom: Style it with Tailwind, CSS-in-JS, or vanilla CSS — your choice.

UI kits were monoliths; primitives are atoms. The future is atomic.

The Kit Is Dead. Long Live Composition.

The frontend world has moved past the illusion of “plug-and-play” design systems. The best teams know that real velocity comes from composability, not convenience.

The UI kit died the moment developers realized they could build faster without it.