> The problem that React originally aimed to solve was creating reactive user interfaces in facebook's monorepo monolith where 1,000+ software engineers are constantly churning code.
Nonsense. React's selling points have nothing to do with repo structure or the number of engineers working on a project.
If you ever used React at all, you would understand that updating the entire state of the appocation after receiving any input is a non-trivial feature that React turned into a trivially solved problem.
On top of that, React adds modularity and composability.
I wonder if you're criticizing something you have absolutely no experience in.
why it does things the way it does is relevant - the reason facebook had problems with state management and modularity was the sheer number of engineers working in a single shared codebase (I was there, it was miserable)
If you were building a state update layer without Facebook’s constraint of extreme scale, it might look rather different
(Also, I’m not criticising react - it solves a variety of problems well. If they are the same problems you have, great)
> why it does things the way it does is relevant -
Yes. React automatically detects the minimum set of changes to a DOM that is required to update it's state, and manages how those updates are applied to maximize performance. It transparently handles both app state changes, and basic changes to views triggered by updates to models.
This is a problem everyone in webdev has. Everyone.
Did you saw any of the comments here on how a little JavaScript allows people to update the DOM?
> the reason facebook had problems with state management and modularity was the sheer number of engineers working in a single shared codebase (I was there, it was miserable)
No.
The reason why Facebook had problems with state management and modularity was because Facebook had to maintain websites.
The reason why Facebook developed React was because they had clever people who identified the problem and were given resources to work on a way to turn a hard problem they experienced into a trivially solvable problem.
Companies, big and small, develop their own tooling and infrastructure to improve efficiency, and they do it all the time.