[marknutter]

There's no need to query elements with Aurelia either, and it also does not render anything that isn't visible. I only use Aurelia because that's what they were using when I got hired, but for my personal projects I use Virtual DOM.

React is just way too heavy for my needs and if I'm going to put markup in my JS files I might as well just use Hyperscript so it actually is javascript. By pairing virtual-dom with redux, my entire application's state, including how the UI currently looks, is held in one large immutable object which I just apply reducers to when I want to change the interface. React, and all the other modern front-end frameworks, still have to deal with state living in two places (in stores and in the DOM) whereas in my apps' state only lives in once place - the Redux store.

Don't get me wrong, React pushed front-end development forward in a big way, but a lot of cool stuff has come out of the woodwork in response to it that is definitely worth checking out. I'm more interested true functional-reactive web libraries than React. Cycle, Elm, Ohm, and Mercury are a few I would recommend checking out.