I have to strongly agree with this. The entire point of react was to avoid all the challenges of old imperative coding of syncing up state with render state. The Dom digging was an absolutely genius idea to stop that nonsense and just render the correct state and let the framework handle the rest.

I wrote a ton of backbone code, and was a major fan of jquery before Dom querying was even a feature of browsers. And once I went react I really fell in love with frontend dev. Frontend is so simple now because of it, while it used to be dare I say more complex than backend back in the day.