> yes if you architect things well then you could avoid a lot of these - but let's face it, front end developers weren't typically renown for their application architecture skills. … This is what I understood the claim that VDOMs are faster than the real DOM meant - and the article is pretty much eliding this detail.

I agree that a large part of the problem is the lack of proper architecture and general poor quality of practice but that’s also a problem for the distinction which you’re attempting to draw. I think the core React team likely meant what you meant but the community’s love of both fads and crapping on whatever isn’t new and shiny meant that nuance was deeply buried under the “it’s go-faster magic from Facebook!!!” marketing train.

I remember having absolutely surreal experiences where it was like “why are you saying it’s faster? Here’s a benchmark showing it’s 5 orders of magnitude slower.” “It uses a virtual DOM” “I know, but don’t you have a benchmark where it’s actually faster?” “You just don’t get it”.

I do think React helped bring some improvements around architecture but I think an under-appreciated part of that was that since it required a full compiler toolchain, 100% of projects could use the latest JavaScript features (notably ES6 classes and arrow functions), data structures, modules rather than rewriting everything, etc. which noticeably reduced the number of complex things people had to get right, tune, and reason about.