[lhorie]

Lifecycles are important if you need to do some arbitrary DOM manipulation upon mounting an element to the DOM tree. For example, you may want to render a google map when navigating to some route.

"Overcomplication" is in the eye of the beholder. You can't tell your client that his wanting a map in the contact page is "overcomplicating a conceptually simple process". At some point, if a system's restrictions are too strict for the sake of simplicity/beauty/etc, then it ceases to be useful in the real world.