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Thanks! Yeah, I don't get it either. I think esamatti is exactly right: the original Facebook example used singletons and everyone followed their lead.

That, combined with the fact that all CommonJS modules are singletons, anyway.

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All JavaScript modules are singletons regardless of the format. But it's still a very common practice to export a constructor function as the module's value and then to instantiate new instances. No idea why that hasn't been followed with React, but I imagine that you are correct about the Facebook example. They should have put more care into making it correct rather than just making it simple to explain.

Yep, that's what I was trying to say. The require cache makes the singleton pattern extra alluring, even in cases where you should avoid it.

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