Knockout was definitely easier to get started with vs other frameworks of the time, but still not easy by any stretch. It took time to master the template DSL,

Knockout was definitely easier to get started with vs other frameworks of the time, but still not easy by any stretch. It took time to master the template DSL, debugging templates would take you all across the guts of Knockout, and complex 2-way bindings could have you spending hours debugging them. Getting good performance was also very tricky. ReactJS of the time was pretty simple. https://web.archive.org/web/20131105184444/http://facebook.github.io/react/docs/getting-started.html https://web.archive.org/web/20131105184444/http://facebook.g... You could read every scrap of documentation in around an hour or so. There were only around a dozen-ish APIs to learn along with only a couple "unique" concepts like controlled inputs, refs, and JSX. Meanwhile, there was never a need to step into React code unless you believed React itself was buggy (I only came across this one time and the bug had already been reported and was being worked on). Even better, React code was usually faster than Knockout before optimizing stuff and the ways to improve performance were generally pretty obvious.