[wonnage]

Maybe you're just not familiar enough with React? The core of it is actually quite simple, it's just a giant while loop tree traversal that gets triggered either imperatively (by calling one of the React.render* functions) or in response to a state change. The VDOM stuff is mostly orthogonal to this, it just improves performance in the browser, but you could technically skip it without losing anything.

Your argument is basically the same as saying you'd rather view HTML as a giant string rather than in a tree view... the devtools basically present something that's linear (the tree traversal) in a tree view, it's not that bad.