React made front end suck. Sorry.
Arguably React does have a 'disadvantage' in the sense that it doesn't do two-way data binding, and chooses to update as little of the DOM as necessary to render a change (which it's good at, and gets right), but that's sometimes more than just changing a text node or a value. I suspect that if React hadn't come along there'd be lots of homegrown frameworks doing something similar in a worse way. React is well thought-out and well designed.
Also, every reactive framework can have the same problem. It's not a React thing; it's a library-that-tracks-changes-and-updates-the-DOM thing. Used poorly you'll end up in a re-render loop.
We could just have static HTML pages and that would eliminate the whole problem, but then we'd be complaining about the electricity used on network roundtrips and people using badly coded desktop apps instead. Ultimately, libraries can be as bulletproof and fool-proof as you like, and developers will find new and novel ways to use them to build crap software. The responsibility (mostly) lies with the developers much more than the library.
But most apps don’t need a persistent counter that updates without browser refresh. Further, there were other easy solutions like http request polling, or even websockets. They weren’t solutions for Facebook because they had to support lots of devices that couldn’t handle something like websockets. But instead of the industry realizing this was a specific tool for a specific niche case we just piled on to the design pattern and built a massive lock in ecosystem that may the web worse.
Rich Harris makes the point that React isn't actually reactive: "React doesn’t have any understanding of the values running through your app. It is not Reactive."
Rich Harris - Rethinking reactivity:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdNJ3fydeao
>Modern JavaScript frameworks are all about reactivity. Change your application's state, and the view updates automatically. But there's a catch — tracking state changes at runtime adds overhead that eats into your bundle size and performance budgets. In this talk, we'll discover an alternative approach: moving reactivity into the language itself. Your apps have never been smaller or faster than they're about to become.
He starts with spreadsheets as the archetypal reactive system.
Defines reactivity as values automatically updating according to dependency relationships.
Contrasts that with React's model of rerunning component functions and diffing virtual DOM trees.
Argues that React "doesn't understand the values flowing through your application" and therefore isn't reactive in the traditional sense.
Virtual DOM is pure overhead:
https://svelte.dev/blog/virtual-dom-is-pure-overhead
>But it turns out that we can achieve a similar programming model without using virtual DOM — and that's where Svelte comes in.
React tracks component renders; reactive systems track data dependencies. React doesn't react, it repeats.
I think React should have been called "Repeat", "Re-Run", "Regurgitate", or "Retch".
But I found the best development cycle as a rails/django multi page apps developer. Anytime I encountered something I needed to update without a refresh it was easy to solve with polling or eventually websockets.