It argued that you can do that without using React. I actually didn't see that argument being made - two way data bindings are not the same thing. To achieve

It argued that you can do that without using React. I actually didn't see that argument being made - two way data bindings are not the same thing. To achieve React's simplicity you either need to a) Simply tear down the entire DOM and rebuild it - works for small UIs and I've actually used this myself before react existed b) Implement something similar to the Virtual DOM that react has for any non-trivial UI that is too slow to rebuild on every user interaction.