It's pretty much been the standard way to develop UI's since smalltalk. If you look at the old Windows (IIRC 95) render loop, and squint just enough you see rea

It's pretty much been the standard way to develop UI's since smalltalk. If you look at the old Windows (IIRC 95) render loop, and squint just enough you see react. It's not the greatest, but no one has devised better way to do large app UI dev across teams other than component models. React is just that model bolted onto JavaScript much like the win api was for C++. Before jQuery there was Dojo and by a few months YUI, React is really just a focused and cleaned up version of Dojo's component lifecycle model. React's novelty was the virtual DOM and it was a big leap in realizing web components without sacrificing performance. jQuery got popular because it was easy, and good for quick and dirties, but it fails when you try to scale it to more than a few developers. It's not a bad tech but you can paint yourself into a corner with it pretty quick if you have to scale it across a team. You see bad code happens. Black boxing is a way of limiting bad codes impact on the overall system, because it is easier to rip it out and replace it. Functional programming is black boxes for back end business logic. Components are black boxes for the UI. It protects me from you and you from me and therein lies the importance of it.