[jeswin]

What's one good reason why JS proxies (which let you listen to "state.totals = 100") aren't a cleaner solution to trigger a rerender?

There's no need to rerender the whole frame - will be happy to provide an example on request.

[phryneas]

That would be the "observing" approach I described.

The upside of an action-based (signalling) approach is that you have a better time separating concerns as actions (if used correctly) represent intent, so your component emits an event and the state acts accordingly, removing state logic from your representational components. Might also be a lot easier to see in the DevTools what happened when and why.

Of course not every app needs a pattern like that, that's why I said both approaches are valid.

[jeswin]

My point is that the action-based approach you describe is extremely verbose for very little gain. Most apps don't need it, yet that's what Redux forces you to do.

Regarding DevTools, it's just as easy to make it work with "observing".

Also, I'm not saying you should write state changes and data fetching in the UI components. By all means write them under actions/services whatever. I'm complaining about the complexity around effecting that change.

[phryneas]

It doesn't seem verbose to me. Have you looked into those docs above? You define a reducer and an action creator is automatically generated. String action types are an implementation detail. No manual immutable state modification, as immer is baked in. Modern redux is maybe 20% of what you might be imagining if you only know legacy redux.

It's not much more code than writing a function, but other reducers of your state can suddenly act upon the same action, you can trigger side effects using middleware and of course watch stuff "by intent" and not "there was a modification" in the devtools. All while keeping everything separated pretty well.