&gt; Because it&#x27;s built on the assumption that just because DOM access is slow, then it&#x27;s a good idea to just add another layer of JS in order to provide a cached-like faster DOM access speed, rather than focusing on fixing DOM access speed issue itself.<p>The virtual DOM is just an implementation detail. In my eyes, React&#x27;s big feature is that it is a declarative, component-based UI model. Look at React Native or ComponentKit - they are not built around the idea that CocoaTouch is slow, but rather that there are simpler ways to do UI than the traditional imperative approach.<p>&gt; React augments the complexity of a stack that it&#x27;s already too complex, to an unneeded, non-sustainable and dev-unfriendly way in which we are supposed to use HTML tags inside JS scripts.<p>In my experience, as I mentioned above, React actually provides a fantastic abstraction that makes it simpler to build UIs. I haven&#x27;t found it to be dev-unfriendly at all, the opposite actually - I find that it is a highly pragmatic, productive and pleasant way to work. But I suppose that&#x27;s a matter of preference. What do you find unfriendly about it in particular?<p>&gt; React is not a product of love for a greatly engineered system, but obviously just a product of FB&#x27;s understandable necessity to work faster &quot;today and here&quot;, in order to keep bringing home their daily profit.<p>This point I must disagree with absolutely. I have had many interactions with people who work on React and from my point of view it is indeed a labor of love as much as any I&#x27;ve seen on an OSS project. Do you have any examples that you can point towards to back up your assertion? Just watch presentations by any of the React team members and you&#x27;ll see that there are real people behind it that care deeply about it. Better yet, talk to any of them in person and see how excited they are! This isn&#x27;t a heartless top-down mandated project by a massive organization to squeeze more money out, but rather it started off as a skunkworks project by a single engineer in his spare time who thought that UI could be simpler, that caught on within the company because it turned out to be a great idea.<p>&gt; React is not a solution, it&#x27;s a patch, a ugly one.
&gt; We are not forced to like it just because FB made it and made it OS.<p>Well, isn&#x27;t the world beautiful, so many different opinions! I&#x27;m extremely curious what your preferred tooling is, or any suggestions you have to make React better. Maybe you could write a longer form essay to elaborate on your criticisms above?