Not an expert. My take is this: I was thrilled several times when I started exploring ECS. As a long time pseudo OO developer (not a fan) I found that first of

Not an expert. My take is this: I was thrilled several times when I started exploring ECS. As a long time pseudo OO developer (not a fan) I found that first of all ECS really did help me write fast update loops, and when the loop become slow it was easy to determine what was slow simply by commenting out different system update calls. IMO it really delivers on the performance front of you pay attention. Second, you can't always do this, but I had cases where once an entity had no more components, it simply ceased to exist, and there was no separate collection simply containing entities themselves. A novel approach compared to OO, and I found it refreshing. Third, it encourages you to think about each component separately, because they will have their own collection and engine. This makes refactoring so easy, because you are looking at typically a handful of properties at most, and a small dedicated engine routine. This delivers on many of the promises of microservices. The last obvious but IMO incredibly important benefit I found was the loose coupling that resulted. Sure not everything is isolated, I would often need to share components between services, but usage and purpose was clear and obvious, and I found myself refactoring components with ease. Contrast this with OO design that encourages abstract concepts like User which, it turns out, have the gravity of black holes and can swallow up any number of properties that SEEM like they should go there. Good luck teasing this apart later, and even remembering what half of them do. I found the concept in the article that humans are more likely to make additive than subtractive changes profound, and it seems we must recognize this and fight against it as developers wherever we can. (It's definitely true in the audio world, where, e.g., people are much more likely to make additive than subtractive EQ changes, unless they're professionals.)