That such a complex convoluted explanation that seemingly contradicts itself is why I have such a hard time grasping why anyone would use this crap by choice. Read your second paragraph. Why go through all those hassles with all the sick buzzword doubletalk?

Again, why not just go straight to the DOM?

Whenever people say "State" I really start to glaze over the way I do when people try to shoe-horn MVC in places it doesn't belong like PHP.

Though a lot of that is my using MVC in actual single deployment applications under Ada and Smalltalk, where that separation makes sense... unlike PHP where 90%+ of the job is accept input, process data, output result, in that order.

This "state" rubbish gives me that same vibe of taking concepts that have ZERO business in JavaScript -- especially client-side -- and shoving them in like trying to stuff a cow's size 18 hoof into a size 5 pump... since server side shouldn't give a damn, and client-side you can just do it without the extra time wasting hard to use overhead.

I dunno, maybe I spent too many years hard-coding binary trees in DiBol, Ada and Assembler. I can visualize the DOM in my head and its object structure, which is why what react provides is all pointlessly redundant and painfully wasteful. I just don't see a single advantage in it, everything I've worked on for clients that uses it has been incompetent rubbish, and with all the lies that prop it up it feels outright sleazy and predatory.