Exercise 1: Why Vanilla JS Instead of a Third React Course — Possible Solution
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WHAT WOULD HAPPEN WITH A THIRD REACT COURSE
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Food Tracker (React + Express) and Food Tracker (React + Firebase) already demonstrate React paired with two genuinely different backends. Pairing FastAPI with React as well would mean re-teaching many of the same frontend concepts (component structure, hooks, state management) a third time, without adding much genuinely new material on the frontend side.

WHY VANILLA JS SERVES THIS COURSE'S ACTUAL GOAL BETTER
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This course's real purpose is teaching FastAPI's own backend design - async routes, Pydantic validation, automatic documentation, and so on. A deliberately plain frontend (real HTML, real CSS, plain fetch calls, no framework, no build step) removes any frontend-framework complexity from the picture entirely, keeping every chapter's attention focused specifically on the backend concepts this course actually exists to teach.

WHY THIS WORKS AS AN ANSWER
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It correctly explains that two React variants already exist in this quartet, making a third one largely repetitive on the frontend side, and correctly connects the choice of vanilla JS to this course's own specific teaching goal of keeping focus on FastAPI's backend design rather than frontend framework mechanics.