You are programatically updating elements in React, you just internalized a different set of rules (putting state in the designated buckets vs calling an update function). It is the equivalent of this:

    const setState = (s) => { state = s; rerender() };

Real reactivity is what you get with proxies in Vue, or a smart compiler like Svelte.

> I can alter global state ... that isn't possible with this framework

You'd just need to export a state object from a module, import into the components, and call rerender after any mutation. I've actually written quite a few vanilla-js apps using this structure when I don't want to bother with tooling, small pages don't need a complex reconciler.

I'm not saying this is better btw - there are ergonomic concerns and different trade-offs, but the distance from this to what React does is much, much shorter than most people think. We've just been conditioned to accept its rules as 'normal': don't declare plain variables in your functions, don't mutate properties, don't use inline functions as props, don't rely on previous state object for updates, and so on... step outside the box and you'll get a mess too. This library is just a smaller, different shape box.