React was the first front end js framework that passed the smell test, it just looked right. If you'd worked in UI generally the popular libraries of the time

React was the first front end js framework that passed the smell test, it just looked right. If you'd worked in UI generally the popular libraries of the time like backbone, angular 1, ember, knockout, etc. clearly were flawed and chaotic (with apologies to mithril and a few others.) and would obviously quickly spaghettify. These days between template literals, indexeddb and a simple library like morphdom you can write fast, predictable, queriable UI's that are offline first, persistent and easy to refactor and decouple components if your data model changes. The problem with front end UI in js was that instead of being logical and operating off of some kind of persistent DBesque data model that you could query and increment.. you were stuck with ephemeral data and your UI was built off of arbitrary API calls that disjoint the consumption of and hide the underlying data model. Rendering complex UI without the backing of proper data tools will not be clean or comprehendable over time.