But react did "reinvent the wheel", and it did it so well that it changed the way frontend development is done. When I look at what we had before, it feels even

But react did "reinvent the wheel", and it did it so well that it changed the way frontend development is done. When I look at what we had before, it feels even more innovative because it offered a simple interface to DOM manipulation and it took away all the struggles of doing that with jQuery or vanilla JS. To me it feels like such a simple concept that I'm amazed it took us so long to discover.