It’s helpful for preserving the focused element when updating the UI state. AFAIK, that’s not a trivial problem.

Other than that you can pretty much get away with a small createElement helper like this one:

https://github.com/ericfortis/mockaton/blob/main/src/Dashboa...

What did React ever do to you?

The value of React is:

* JSX because dealing with the DOM directly is emotionally traumatic for many people

* a line item on a resume

* components because many developers cannot figure out how to put things together without third party guidance

* state management because designing a common data structure, or just data structures in general, to store and recall state is just setting expectations far too high