[mike_hearn]

The React paradigm is just error prone. It's not necessarily about how much you spend. Well paid engineers can still make mistakes that cause unnecesssary re-renders.

If you look at older desktop GUI frameworks designed in a performance-oriented era, none of them use the React paradigm, they use property binding. A good example of getting this right is JavaFX which lets you build up functional pipelines that map data to UI but in a way that ensures only what's genuinely changed gets recomputed. Dependencies between properties are tracked explicitly. It's very hard to put the UI into a loop.

[tracker1]

Property binding and proxies really didn't work well in JS at all until relatively recently, and even then there is actually a much worse history of state management bugs in apps that do utilize those patterns. I've yet to actively use any Angular 1.x app or even most modern Angular apps that don't have bugs as a result of improper state changes.

While more difficult, I think the unidirectional workflows of Redux/Flux patterns when well-managed tend to function much better in that regard, but then you do suffer from potential for redraws... this isn't the core of the DOM overhead though... that usually comes down to a lot of deeply nested node structures combined with complex CSS and more than modest use of oversized images.