React is not an abstraction, and to be honest the fact you are calling it that kind of makes it easy to dismiss your post here. But you are right that it's mos

React is not an abstraction, and to be honest the fact you are calling it that kind of makes it easy to dismiss your post here. But you are right that it's mostly all down to how you write the code. But I'll gladly argue that it's a lot easier to write bad, inefficient UI code with vanilla JS than with React. You don't really get to see the alternative because generally, react makes things so much easier and efficient that it opens a lot of doors and allows companies to go crazy with features and bloat. By being the beast it is, it puts a lot of power in the hands of developers, but equivalent UIs without react will most likely be 3 magnitudes worse. Keyword: equivalent.