If you valued your sanity when developing complex Web UIs, React was a lifesaver.
DOM sucks though, it's slow, it's heavyweight, it lacks transactions. We're stuck with it, and frameworks like React have to do the DOM diffing + patching thing, explicitly, in JS.
Agree that react isn’t the best implementation of the concept, both in terms of ergonomics and efficiency. But a react-like framework is still very much needed to create complex apps in the browser. So IMHO react is a solution to a very current problem, only not an ideal one.
Not really? `useSignal` is just another hook React needs as a replacement/augment for `useState` and maybe `useEffect`. Signals aren't that special. Arguably that's part of why a lot of people like Signals as a proposal.
(I'm still of the sort that thinks Signals are just worse Observables, so it's not a proposal I'm particularly thrilled about, but were it to be adopted Signals are easy to use in Observable contexts as well, they are just uglier half-implemented BehaviorSubjects, though maybe with a few extra lint rules to prefer Observable behaviors over Signal ones.)
Missed this but - there’s a very meaningful difference between templates and React at least how most people think of templates.
React lets you return dynamic tree structures and insert code anywhere inline in that structure. Most templates explicitly don’t allow that for good reason. Further, most but not all templating frameworks have special syntax for conditional logic and loops.
If JSX is templating then templating has no meaning. Would createElement() be a template? In that case all functional programming is.
I can't even begin to imagine how much CPU and bandwidth is wasted with billions of users downloading, parsing, and executing something like React.