Animated SVG Icons in React: Why SMIL Still Wins in 2026

<p>The App Router flipped the default. Every component you write is a Server Component until something opts it out, and one <code>'use client'</code> at the top of a file opts out

<p>In Q3 2025, our 14-person frontend team stared down a 3.2MB initial bundle for our Angular 18 enterprise resource planning (ERP) app — a figure that triggered 4.7s first

<p>There are exactly three sensible ways to get an SVG icon into a React codebase: paste it inline as a component, import the file through a build transform like SVGR, or

<p><em>Your SVG files are valid. Your toolbar icons look fine. But some dropdown menus are suddenly missing their icons. Here's why that happens—and how to catch it before