Right. I encourage young devs to build a complex app using vanilla js. Feel the pain of two way state management. Then you’ll gain an appreciation for react. And you’ll learn browser APIs and know when react is overkill because it has its own pain
It's not even the young devs. It looks like most of those complaining are back end developers who "rarely tinker with frontend" but think they can teach everyone else how to make it simple because "it should be static forms".
A great example of all-world-is-a-nail stance mixed with extreme hubris.
i’ve tried this, and it almost almost works to just rebuild the Dom on every state change as a pure function of state without any react or anything. The resulting interface is actually way snappier than react – but preserving local state of elements like what text is highlighted, where the cursor is, which radio button is tabbed to etc turns into a nightmare.