What bothers me about React is that there&#x27;s too much magic going on under the hood, I like minimal libraries that I can easily reason about.  jQuery isn&#x27;t small but is really simple.  Backbone too - you could just read the source to instantly answer any questions.  Angular &amp; React remind me of RoR - sacrificing simplicity in favour of &quot;magic&quot; for a few made-up use cases.  Being forced to do things the framework&#x27;s way (embedding HTML in your code, always having to diff the DOM, etc) to adhere to framework&#x27;s principles <i>sometimes</i> becomes a hindrance<p>I&#x27;ve ended up doing the same - writing yet another super minimal framework: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;techlayer&#x2F;espresso.js" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;techlayer&#x2F;espresso.js</a><p>It borrows lots of concepts from React, but is faster &amp; more memory efficient in under 500 LOCs.