You're not wrong, but I think you're missing the value of React: the simplicity is not having to worry about the correctness or efficiency of your render engine. You get to go back to a more declarative way of writing code that comes with a modular composable style. There's a cost to pay for this: surrendering control (and easy insight) of the DOM you once knew to React's core logic. You do get a variety of callbacks to hook into, and I always encourage people to learn more about their frameworks, but you're not buying a set of convenience methods like you were with jQuery: this is effectively an interpreter between your data and its rendering.