While I see a fair bit of elegance in your experiment, IMHO I also think that for it to be React-like and start mentioning code size one should at least handle

While I see a fair bit of elegance in your experiment, IMHO I also think that for it to be React-like and start mentioning code size one should at least handle structural changes (ie adding/removing items like in a todo-app). I made a minimal Vue-inspired templating thingy a while back and a fair bit of the codesize (part due to impl and part due to architecture to make it solid) is spent to handle cases of structural changes (adding/removing items, updating event listeners,etc).