I dislike hot reload for a few reasons. One, it makes it difficult to keep two tabs open to compare the "before" and "after" of a change, because both tabs reload the "after" instantly. Two, you can get into an "impossible" state where you've navigated into a section of the site and get to see an "after" state that turns out to be unreachable because the change affected earlier navigation. Three, it is often unclear if everything reloaded properly during a hot reload, especially if you have also fiddled around with stylesheets etc in the chrome developer console. To each his own, though! :)