For a solo project I think React doesn't offer quite as much benefit (although I think I am faster in it). But for team projects the team members can stop worry

For a solo project I think React doesn't offer quite as much benefit (although I think I am faster in it). But for team projects the team members can stop worrying about where the data comes from and just worry about their component. In your shopping cart example, say the project manager decides they want to display how may of an item you have in your cart next to the item in the catalog. Then a feature is added to remove items from any page by having a dropdown on the cart logo. So is it the responsibility of the person writing the cart dropdown to update the catalog listing or the responsibility of the person writing the catalog listing to know about the drop-down? In React you only need to bind to the data. If the data changes and your DOM then changes as a result then you update. You don't need to know why or how it changed. As far as the virtual DOM being perhaps heavy handed. It is a performance optimization and not really a core concept. The React team found it was faster to update only the parts of the DOM that changed rather than redraw the entire screen and came up with a clever way to do that without having to know the implementation details of each component. Contrast that with the naive approach (using innerHTML) which would make even a "update the character count every time a key is pressed" UI grind to a halt.