The "magic" of React though is in its name, it's reactive. If all you're doing is creating static elements that don't need to react to changes in state then yeah, React is overkill. But when you have complex state and need all your elements to update as that state changes, then the benefits of React (or similar frameworks) become more apparent. Of course it's all still possible in vanilla JS, but it starts to become a mess of event handlers and DOM updates and the React equivalent starts to look a lot more appealing.