As has been noted in other comments, there is a growing list of technologies that implement some variation of RPC such that events on the client trigger server

As has been noted in other comments, there is a growing list of technologies that implement some variation of RPC such that events on the client trigger server events. Those events persist any data changed and then regenerate the current state of the UI and ship the diff back to the client, ideally via calls to the morphdom library. What frustrates me is that it's not the API that is the source of complexity. ~80% of the pain of building most apps comes from managing the syncronization of state between the client and server. SPAs are the over-prescribed opiates here making the problem worse. Imagine what could be possible if you walked away from maintaining client state altogether. We did, and it's wonderful. StimulusReflex let me build a reactive tabular UI with sorting, filtering and pagination with 115 LOC, none of which is custom JS: http://expo.stimulusreflex.com/demos/tabular http://expo.stimulusreflex.com/demos/tabular I honestly believe that the existence of things like StimulusReflex and LiveView demand we question the ongoing utility of libraries like React. Popularity is not a good reason to use something, especially when you realize you could be radically more productive if you don't use it.