What bothers me about React is that there's too much magic going on under the hood, I like minimal libraries that I can easily reason about. jQuery isn't small

What bothers me about React is that there's too much magic going on under the hood, I like minimal libraries that I can easily reason about. jQuery isn't small but is really simple. Backbone too - you could just read the source to instantly answer any questions. Angular & React remind me of RoR - sacrificing simplicity in favour of "magic" for a few made-up use cases. Being forced to do things the framework's way (embedding HTML in your code, always having to diff the DOM, etc) to adhere to framework's principles sometimes becomes a hindrance I've ended up doing the same - writing yet another super minimal framework: https://github.com/techlayer/espresso.js https://github.com/techlayer/espresso.js It borrows lots of concepts from React, but is faster & more memory efficient in under 500 LOCs.