[lopatin]

It's not complexity that you take on. The React API is minimal. It's complexity that the React authors take on in order to provide a stable, cross platform, predictable component lifecycle. And if some of that complexity leaks through, or you don't like the file size of the resulting library, feel free to not use it, but I wouldn't go so far as to say that solving hard problems via sufficiently abstracted away complexity is a bad thing.

With React Native I re-use over 75% of code from the web version of my apps. An actual measurable leap in productivity. Or even just for the web version, React and other frameworks (inb4 "not a framework"), provide their own proven patterns and best practices for scaling a code base, a task that is out of scope of any DOM utility library. And if providing those patterns requires more complexity under the hood, well, you don't refuse a free Lamborghini because it's "more complex under the hood" than your current Toyota.