Seven demos in our portfolio were broken
Seven of the showroom's ten directions returned a 404 error. The reason fits in one line of code — and it is a trap any modern React project can have.
When we opened the project, we tested the ten demos in the showroom. Three worked. Seven returned "page not found".
The portfolio existed, it was finished, it was well made — and seven tenths of it were unreachable. Nobody had noticed because the showroom links led to the three that worked.
The cause: the file with the data for the seven demos started with the "use client" directive. When a server component imports a file like that, React does not hand over the data — it hands over an empty reference. The check "does this demo exist?" answered "no" for all of them.
The file was right, the data was right, and still the server received nothing. Boundaries between server and client fail silently.
The fix was to move the data into a file without that directive. Three lines. The seven pages came back the same minute.
The lesson is not about React. It is about what a company website hides: features nobody tests because nobody clicks them. We ran an HTTP sweep across every route on the site — that is how we found it. Today that is part of our delivery process.