[sunwukung]

I think this in turn is a symptom of conflating rendering with state management in the first place.

The line between React and vanilla code is blurring more every day - which is a bit greedy for something that's purely meant to be a rendering solution. I would personally advocate to push React as far away from my app code as possible, and instead implement a specialised container class that hooks into React's internals (Controller? Model?) purely to handle localised state changes.