Replicant takes this idea and runs with it, narrowing it down even further: The function is a pure function that returns the new UI as data. Replicant uses this representation to update the DOM accordingly.
That’s it. No partial updates, no mutable objects, no network activity from UI components. It’s basically a templating system. You give it data, and it returns a view. Whether that data comes from a DB or any other place, it's just a clojure data structure. Here is the article that most of this comment is lifted from: https://replicant.fun/top-down/
So, is the main difference that replicant is not built on top of react?