If you valued your sanity when developing complex Web UIs, React was a lifesaver.

DOM sucks though, it's slow, it's heavyweight, it lacks transactions. We're stuck with it, and frameworks like React have to do the DOM diffing + patching thing, explicitly, in JS.

Nah.

https://svelte.dev/blog/virtual-dom-is-pure-overhead

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43971164

React appeared in 2013, Svelte, in 2016. Three years is a lot. What comes next can see and avoid some pitfalls of earlier designs.

1. I'm referring to the comment that the DOM is slow/bad. It is not. Moreover, VDOM is ON TOP OF the DOM.

2. We're currently living in 2025. React (and SPAs) is not even slightly necessary.

React was a solution to a ten years ago problem

You can downvote it but it doesn’t make it any less true

Alex Russell has written swathes of arguments about Reacts performance issues https://infrequently.org/2024/11/if-not-react-then-what/

The DOM has become much faster since React started over a decade ago, the VDOM really isn’t needed anymore even for app like experiences

React is about developer preference over user experience

Agree that react isn’t the best implementation of the concept, both in terms of ergonomics and efficiency. But a react-like framework is still very much needed to create complex apps in the browser. So IMHO react is a solution to a very current problem, only not an ideal one.