[jfengel]

There's never a need for React. Anything you can do in React can be done in plain JS.

The question is how fast you can do it and how easy it is to maintain. React simplifies the effects of state change, at a cost of doing more renders and diff. It's got nice properties for debugging, kinda like functional programming, especially as the thing gets bigger and more complex.

It's not magic. It just makes some things convenient. It seems to hit a sweet spot for ease of writing and maintaining. If you don't like it you don't have to use it.