You can ask for research and proof sure, but it should be very intuitive that a delcarative, "re-render everything from props and state with a call to setState(

You can ask for research and proof sure, but it should be very intuitive that a delcarative, "re-render everything from props and state with a call to setState()" system is less error prone than the two way binding digest mess that is angular, or manual dom manipulations for that matter. Reminder: VirtualDOM is just an optimization of the rerender everything problem.