<i>&gt;He&#x27;s not trying to make an argument against React.</i><p>I disagree.  He actually <i>is making an argument against React</i> but disguising it with a <i>passive-aggressive</i> writing style.  That said, it doesn&#x27;t mean his article is not helpful because like you said, it <i>did</i> help you.<p>I interpreted the following paragraph as passive-aggressive:<p><i>&quot;If you want to use React, fine, I am not trying to convince anyone not to. I just want to show that components in a JavaScript application are quite simple to do and do not require any framework at all to do so.&quot;</i><p>It follows the very familiar template of X-is-overkill-so-let-me-enlighten-you-young-grasshopper.  Another example would be, &quot;Hey, if you want to use a bazooka to kill a house fly, don&#x27;t let me stop you but I just want to point out you can take a plain old rolled up newspaper and just swat at with a quick motion of the arm.&quot;<p>That type of rhetorical construct has been common sport in technical discussions for decades.[1]<p>Why interpret his paragraph like that?  Look at his previous 2 paragraphs about seeing another &quot;react, angular, ember&quot;, etc and how it&#x27;s just tiring. (In other words, he&#x27;s telegraphing to readers that he&#x27;s intelligent enough not to have to learn them or need them.)<p>Yes, he does show the underlying skeleton of a &quot;view&quot; by showing some homegrown Javascript code but notice how he leaves out the concept of &quot;DOM diffing algorithm&quot;.  The virtual DOM is one of the features that makes React perform better with many components and changes.<p>Now if the author starts implementing more and more things that React does to achieve feature parity, he will end up inventing his own Pseudoconcurrentthought-framework.  At that point, someone else will come along and write &quot;<i>the Pseudoconcurrentthought framework is not necessary.  You can do it with plain old Javascript</i>&quot;  At the point, the cycle of critique will have repeated itself.<p>[1]E.g. &quot;Angular is overkill when you can just use JQuery&quot;; &quot;JQuery is overkill when you can just use plain Javascript getelementbyid()&quot;;  &quot;Using Javascript on the web page form is overkill to compute sales tax since you can just issue a POST and have the server send back another HTML page with the new sales tax amount&quot;, and so on and so on.