100%. People get so intimidated by these huge frameworks and get FOMO, that they never try to build something from scratch. React seems simple, but if you tri

100%. People get so intimidated by these huge frameworks and get FOMO, that they never try to build something from scratch. React seems simple, but if you tried to understand what is going on under the hood it would take you months. Simple should be: can you trace through all the code yourself. Like Backbone.js for example. Plus, there is already so much rendering complexity under the hood in browser engines. The DOM and CSS are already incredible abstractions available for you to use. I really don't get what is so bad about just having some object to manage a dom element's rendering. Create a single relational source of truth for your data. Then create some view models that listen to this source of truth. Then make your objects listen to these view models. This vdom diffing stuff is so overated. If you have a list of items, and a new item is inserted, I can just insert that directly into the dom. If I render a different entity and it uses mostly the same dom elements, it's really not that hard to tell say: here are some new props, compare them with your old ones, and do what you think is best. React promises this for the entire app but its all magic. I want control of my rendering so I can make things fast. Debugging perf issues in React is insane. Good luck debugging anything.