&gt; manually updating the DOM is as optimized as you can possibly be.<p>Optimized in the sense that it uses less memory and cpu. But  the code isn&#x27;t optimized for humans to reason about (not to mention changing it.)<p>React was never about performance, it&#x27;s about maintainability, readability and reasonability.<p>For me readable and maintainable code is (almost always) more important than fast code.