When you write a gui, you want to think in a tree of component. Ie React.
If you want to print, you think in document (html, …). That’s also a tree by the way.
Html does not have any composability. They try hard to inject that in it (web component, jquery plugin, …)
React (ie virtual dom) is a beauty in this regard and if you don’t use it, you would have a hard time creating any gui with a certain level of difficulty.
React makes development at scale of these things easier, and makes a website really a website (clicks are just triggering javascript instead of the classic post/get cycle that fetches new html). But it is completely unnecessary to build any level of GUI
html(
body(
div(
p("hello world"),
class: "blah"
)
)
)
This is what JSX/TSX are doing under the hood: they're transpiled to a call to React.createElement. You don't actually need them, though.
Anyone who didn’t grow up building stuff prior to 2010 would have difficulty.
we don’t need react in 2024. And it’s only making things worse now. Not better.