Hah, of course, spoke too soon! And it's by Jeff Atwood! I got the idea back then from some game devs who used a variation of this technique (though theirs was a queue mechanism for prioritizing disk reads to speed up loading of important assets and defer the rest in the old magnetic days). Anyway, congrats to the react team, really cool.

I am wondering if they plan to abstract it completely so that everyone uses it without even realizing it.