At some point you have to have state. See where "state should live" here: https://reactjs.org/docs/thinking-in-react.html https://reactjs.org/docs/thinking-in-r

At some point you have to have state. See where "state should live" here: https://reactjs.org/docs/thinking-in-react.html https://reactjs.org/docs/thinking-in-react.html But the very fact that we're having this debate is proving my point. React's programming model is unnecessarily complicated. JavaScript + DOM is all you need. The simple libs (each less than 500 lines) I pointed to get you close to this without sacrificing productivity or code maintainability while keeping the programming model simple.