[gloosx]

I think a lot of stuff is taken wrongly in this article. First of all, React.js is a library that just provides a handful of hooks. "magical HTML and JavaScript" code is called JSX, and that is transpiled by Babel into not-so-magical nested function walls. Imperatively applying mutations to an application state inside a proxy object setter is, in fact, proactive and not reactive. Reactive implies that the renderers are pure declarative functions that are derived from data, so changing the data would result in a different renderer output based on a composition of these pure functions. So, in the end, React.js is just a library that brings a pure functional renderer to the web, and you even need a separate library, called react-dom, in order to manipulate the DOM itself with the outputs of React function. If you want to approach something similar to React, try to abstract away from DOM and HTML, and think in terms of a single pure data function, which returns a tree that can be then traversed into a set of UI elements.