Normally, if you are writing something so weird that it needs to be imperative to be readable or work right, you can just do that inside a useEffect, or at least encapsulate it in a component. For most animations, ReactCSSTransitionGroup is sufficient. This is an interesting case study only because D3 is particular about wanting data to be stored in the DOM, and React is particular about wanting the data to be stored anywhere but the DOM. I am curious though what you mean by dirty refs?