[pavlov]

Forget classes, lifecycles, schedulers and all this stuff for a moment. If you boil it down what you're left with is but a single signature: `createElement(name, props, chilren)`.

When you pare it down to that, you're merely saying that GUIs are trees of configured objects. It's not a great revelation because the very first production GUI (Smalltalk 1972) already worked like that.

To get React from that idea, you need to add back all the stuff that you left out in the previous sentence. You add JavaScript, HTML-like syntax for defining trees and object attributes, component lifecycles and all that. And then it's not a generic idea anymore but a fairly specific implementation that will be superseded by something else eventually.