You’re correct and these people advocating for this are definitely re-rendering every component in their tree with every change

It just means you need more granular contexts right?

Right, but then you have a ton of contexts littered everywhere. Seems like that would be a lot of clutter.

In my experience most of my state in contexts changes infrequently (auth information, or the “current client” for a dashboard, or whatever), and then local state is sufficient for the rest. The few times I have sufficiently complexity in the “middle” I indeed have been annoyed and had to be careful to avoid over-frequent rerenders.

It’s just rare enough that “prefer contexts” is a good rule. Simpler, easier to understand code, with no Redux nonsense.

Redux isn’t nonsense you’re just being dismissive and not taking the time to learn to understand it properly.