[Kwastie]

> manually updating the DOM is as optimized as you can possibly be.

Optimized in the sense that it uses less memory and cpu. But the code isn't optimized for humans to reason about (not to mention changing it.)

React was never about performance, it's about maintainability, readability and reasonability.

For me readable and maintainable code is (almost always) more important than fast code.

[d0m]

On big project, it becomes impossible to optimize the DOM interaction yourself, so you start to do very inefficient operations for sanity's sake. React on the other hand abstract that for you.

I had a project with Angular where one page was really slow. I re-implemented it with backbone / jquery, it was a bit faster but really hard to read and maintain. With React, the code was simpler AND faster, which I was really surprised about.