[monfera]

I'll assume a render tree with only functional components for simplicity's sake, and no observables, just plain function application:

A full rerendering requires that all the functions be called. Indeed, there's a natural limit to how much data is updated on the screen (well, unless we use canvas or WebGL but I digress) but the render functions themselves may be expensive and wasteful to rerun, especially if there is inferrable knowledge that the nature of the change doesn't warrant a recalc in some branches. Even if it doesn't cause jitter, it may be wasteful on mobile battery.

Why do I think render functions may be expensive? Official React documentation steers people toward having stores that keep 'primary truths' rather than things that can be derived from them via pure functions; and it suggests that these calculations be part of the render functions. It works, it's functional and it's clean. But you potentially run a lot of calculations, depending on the domain. With plain FP, much of this will be wasted as causing no visible change. Not only this, but the needlessly executed render functions do generate virtual DOM snippets; and these snippets do get scheduled for DOM diffing. All these add up to what is, in my experience, a jank-inducing difference. I even introduced memoization, but just DOM diffing alone is significant on a sizeable app (which makes sense as there may be an order or two magnitude difference between VDOM elements that exist vs. ones that really may change).

With observables, e.g. reexecuting a calc or regenerating a DOM snippet, control is finer grained, without the manual and possibly erroneous performance optimization hinting approach known as shouldComponentUpdate. I had cases when blind function reapplication (memoized or not) caused jank on the desktop while observables were smooth even on the mobile.