View transitions are the first new animation primitive on the web in a decade that actually changes how I design.

I spent a month using them on a real product, not a demo. Here’s the unglamorous version.

What they’re good for

• Cross-document persistence: an element that exists on two routes can morph between them.
• Hierarchy reveals: an item in a list becoming the detail view, gracefully.
• Cheap polish: tasteful crossfades cost two lines of CSS now.

What they’re bad at

• Anything stateful underneath the transition. React doesn’t know you’re transitioning, so it keeps doing React things and the morph breaks.
• Long animations. Anything past 400ms starts to feel like waiting.
• Accessibility. Reduced-motion is respected, but the default API doesn’t give you enough hooks to design a graceful fallback.

My rule

If the transition can’t be explained in one sentence — what is changing, and why — it’s the wrong tool.