The purpose of downvoting is to indicate that your comments mostly consist of assertions that "react is bad" without really making a proper case for it, and as such don't really contribute to the signal of the discussion at hand - especially since the discussion at hand is about an explainer of the architecture, not a critique of the architecture itself.
If you look at e.g. discussions on vue vs. react posts you'll find that the "react is overcomplicated, here's a cost/benefit analysis" opinion is not controversial at all, and that a reasoned discussion of it will be responded to constructively (or that non-constructive responses will themselves be downvoted).
>A paragraph of well thought out text will be ignored.
I don't feel that it is necessary to have to explain in depth why having such a complex architecture for doing a simple task such as manipulating web pages is a bad thing. It would be like having to explain a joke. Moreover, such a critique would hardly be specific to React, but rather all of the current mainstream front-end web frameworks.
And maybe, maybe we have.
All I did was write the only critical comment in this thread. Everyone else who replied to the OP contributed, "great job, thanks A+".
If you're unaware, "fanboys" is a grenade to incite juvenile flamewars instead of collegial discussion.
>What's missing is that you can make complex web apps without any of these things,
To attempt better instructive discussion instead of arguing from vague and generic platitudes about "needless complexity", can you explain how your simulacra.js (~12kb) is better than reactjs (~130kb)?
For example, does Simulacra have the same features that React? If so, how did you eliminate ~100kb of Javascript to accomplish it, or conversely, what redundant or incompetent code takes up additional ~100kb of wasted bytes in React?
If Simulacra accomplishes its smaller 12kb footprint by having less features, which features in React do developers no longer need because of "modern browsers have standards-compliant DOMs".
In other words, some concrete analysis would be a more productive discussion.