[tomhallett]

To me, the initial allure of the vdom was how much further it got you then backbone.js’ “this.model.on(‘change’, this.render)”. When that one liner in backbone was enough, it was magical. But once you hit scenarios where overwriting the this.el.innerHtml, it became super painful (usually when that el was hooked up to 3rd party plug-ins, html5 video tags, etc).

Once react switched from class based components and mixins, each subsequent release was only more confusing. I remember the conference talk where they explained the problems with mixins (forgetting to cleanup and them all sharing one state), both of which can be solved in a few different ways, but they opted for a whole rewrite for hooks, which I “get”, but think it increased the complexity dramatically for a very low gain.