I did frontend before React, and it was a welcomed change. The core insight of UI being a function of state is a good one. It saves you a bunch of headaches from the jQuery days where you’d have multiple code paths per UI element (adding, removing, mutating). That said I think they lost the plot with hooks and things have gotten needlessly complex since then.

> The core insight of UI being a function of state is a good one.

We had that before, it was called HATEOAS.