That is a silly way to phrase it. It's secondary in the sense that of course a UI framework has to manage state. They all do that if they're complex at all. The

That is a silly way to phrase it. It's secondary in the sense that of course a UI framework has to manage state. They all do that if they're complex at all. The state management is not what distinguishes React from other frameworks; it is distinguished by the (pseudo-)declarative API that it presents to the programmer.