FWIW, my initial interest in React had _nothing_ to do with Facebook at all :) My first web app was built with Google Web Toolkit (GWT) back in 2011-12. GWT w

FWIW, my initial interest in React had _nothing_ to do with Facebook at all :) My first web app was built with Google Web Toolkit (GWT) back in 2011-12. GWT was a Java->JS compiler framework, and I used an additional library called SmartGWT that provided desktop-style widgets. It all did work, and let me use my existing desktop dev skills to build a web app. But, it also had a lot of pain points. From 2013-15, I built a JS app using Backbone. Backbone's flexibility was great. On the other hand, it _also_ had a lot of weaknesses that I ran into over time. Nesting child views was really hard. There were a dozen ways to trigger events. You could use plugins to add functionality, but many were incompatible with each other. It had no rendering capability out of the box - you usually had to use something like Handlebars to generate HTML from templates (although in my case I used an addon called Epoxy for data binding). It had no lifecycle methods built in, although Marionette added that. I started looking at React in 2015 because I wanted to rewrite that GWT app's client (no one else on my team by then knew GWT). I heard about React, started going through the docs and some blog posts... and saw something that solved basically all the Backbone pain points I was experienced. Natural composition of any components by passing props to children, children notifying parents via callbacks, automatic UI updates just by re-rendering, lifecycle methods... it was clearly just an infinitely better UI development paradigm than Backbone or GWT, and switching was a blindingly obvious choice to make. For me at least, Facebook never even entered into it.