Not at all. Without React (or a similar framework) you are still left with the options of: - Manually keep track of UI state (which is complex, and often leads

Not at all. Without React (or a similar framework) you are still left with the options of: - Manually keep track of UI state (which is complex, and often leads to hard to maintain spaghetti code) - Recreate an entire DOM tree every time you re-render (which is slow to the extent that it will often lead to performance problems in practice). Apparently this is not as slow as it used to (so you could probably get away with this sometimes - and you could before), but it's still generally a better idea to use a framework as you get better performance for very low cost. There are plenty of non-React frameworks that will you these benefits too. And many of them are much smaller. I think the reason to use React specifically is more "business reasons" such assurances that the framework will continue to be maintained, library ecosystem, developer pool, etc. Other frameworks are often technically superior, the difference just isn't that great.