XAML has a high learning curve and lots of ways to shoot yourself in the foot. But it works well. I shipped an embedded real-time data visualization product tha

XAML has a high learning curve and lots of ways to shoot yourself in the foot. But it works well. I shipped an embedded real-time data visualization product that used WPF XAML for the UI and ran perfectly smooth on a second-gen Intel Atom. The latest UWP incarnation of XAML is all native and used heavily in Windows itself. MVVM is not an anti-pattern, it's just a simple way to communicate changes to a retained-mode UI framework (XAML's rough analog to React's shouldComponentUpdate). Data binding prevents a lot of error-prone glue code. Disclosure: I work at Microsoft.