[williamcotton]

That is not why React became popular. We have to go back to the end of the server-side ORM era. ERB templates creating an LI element in a certain manner and jQuery creating the same element. So have fun keeping those DOM elements in sync! This and the ever expanding DOM APIs led to single page applications where all of the markup was generated by the client. Cue, oh fuck this is slow and oh fuck, page loads and SEO suffers, so then we see the emergence of virtual DOMs along with server-side Javascript, and we are now generating the same DOM elements with the same code on the front and back. Then everyone realized we are making these complex applications with an untyped language with lots of warts… Flow and Typescript emerge.

Guess what? Spooky action at a distance continues with reducers, custom hooks, custom injected contexts, etc, etc.