[websitescenes]

Honestly, I don't recommend using React unless you're building realtime web applications. Otherwise, you're correct, React is too heavy. If you're not doing realtime, the idea of state is completely unnecessary. But if you are doing realtime web apps the idea of state and hoops that React make you jump through make sense. Is it hard? Yep. Is it worth it. Yep. Will there eventually be a better way? Yep. With that said I think some of the pain points you identified could be simplified. State is needed but immutability could be made easier.