So, we can only hire artisans who hand tailor every event handler, who writes bespoke careful updates that never conflict and always handle every corner case of the dom right? And you and your 63 clones that NYT has hired will all work in harmony & concordance doing your bespoke vanillajs practices.
Reacts vdom is pretty sweet. Even the old iterations of React can go eliminate a lot of paints. Old websites used to have plenty of write-read-write loops that internally block the dom, that react's lifecycle generally helps guard against. The article here talks about even further improved batch updating that React 18 can help with.
Apologies my attitude, but it's just remarkably how much rancis ass attitude there is about React & how fucking stupid it sounds. I know it's the internet, that people will forever be springing up to spout off, but it's so sad having such miserable negativity hounding such perfectly respectable tech.