Ask HN: The imperative approach to animations just makes so much more sense

For me, writing animations declaratively is just painful.

So I made a tiny animation orchestrating library for React and React Router and wrote the following post about it and a bit about why thee declarative approach to animations is such a nightmare for me.

https://dutzi.party/animating-route-transitions-using-react-router/

The relevant bit:

> I don’t like writing complex animations in a declarative manner. They’re great for interactions, but I find that compared to animations written in an imperative way, the learning curve is steep, code readability suffers and playing around (just testing stuff out) is not as fun as the feedback loop tends to be longer. That may be because I started my way out as a Flash (ActionScript) developer, where tween animations were very popular...

Would love to hear why declarative animation libraries are so popular with React (other than the fact that they follow React's basic approach to well, everything).