Interesting article and approach, but I don't think this is really an argument against using something like Angular or React (which alone isn't even a true "MVC

Interesting article and approach, but I don't think this is really an argument against using something like Angular or React (which alone isn't even a true "MVC"). It's more of "for my particular use case, this worked well"... Angular and React most definitely have their use. (In fact, you could probably leverage React's server side rendering and JSX to clean up that long chain of function calls in your page function.)