Right, so let's say your state looks like this: {customers:[{name:"bob",age:21,id:345},{name:"lisa",age:22,id:2992}],selected_customer:345} Now, in this UI if

Right, so let's say your state looks like this: {customers:[{name:"bob",age:21,id:345},{name:"lisa",age:22,id:2992}],selected_customer:345} Now, in this UI if "bob" is selected that's all you see. So the intermediary JSON looks like this: {customer:{name:"bob",age:21}} Since neither the internal UI, the full customer list, nor the selection cursor are visible at this point in the UI, all that info can be preprocessed and omitted, leaving only the bare UI-relevant information. You are right though, many people use "props" in a way that overlaps with what I'm proposing... If you were to write an app where 100% of data is stuffed into props for all components (including the root component) with no direct reference to the state, it would be similar to my suggested approach.