I kinda like react with hooks but I do miss Angular 1 watches. Explicit watch expressions solve a loooot of spurious rerendering nonsense that makes for a lot of churn

Ultimately I think React makes it too hard for the performant solution to be used. And then tries to handwave it all away with “the react compiler solves/will solve it”. Don’t even get me started on “useMemo is not semantics” rationalization. First time runs actually matter when working on a performant UI!

DOM ops are expensive but your little bespoke function component code is also expensive when some hook leads to recalcs all over.