You don't do manual HTML manipulation with this lib either. You can just see your page as being composed of components and replace components in order to update screen.

So, you're still controlling what is updated and when, with the same potential for making mistakes that you'd get in direct DOM manipulation.

React doesn't require you to ever manually replace a component - that's why the two are not comparable.

I am not familiar with the type of mistakes you are talking about. I have used both React and UIBuilder and find them to be comparable. Would you be willing to share an example of the type of mistake that developers frequently make?