[coldtea]

Sure, all abstractions are leaky one way or another, but in the end React gives you much better separation than what we had before.

Having to deal with shouldComponentUpdate is a blessing compared to having to juggle 4-5 different concepts and web technologies, plus manage state, plus separate logic yourself, etc.

Heck, in Backbone, which is as bare as it gets, and you needed to wrap your data in specific classes...

And that's IF (and it's a big IF) you have some very complex performance case. In most cases I never needed it, and tons of stuff can just be a pure render function.

[Silhouette]

Again, I generally agree with your comments here. I just think it's important to point out that this particular leak exists, because a lot of React advocacy completely glosses over the point. The need to have a data model that supports quick diffs one way or another has profound implications for the scalability of your front-end code and it's an architectural decision that will be expensive to change later if you get it wrong initially and learn that the hard way.