> significantly nicer to code for than DOM binding
There are other ways to code this nicely, but _those_ are slower than virtual DOM. Real DOM _can_ indeed easily be faster, but that's not nearly as nice to program for.
Simply saying "No" after a point and not rebutting it is not a good argument.
A lot of people like to point out that the "real DOM" can be just as fast, but far fewer people have any good examples of this being done.
Yeah, for making a button that signs you up to a mailing list or a simple SPA or something like that, you can just use the DOM. But if you have a complex app with a huge amount of data flow and many components, React (and Preact and etc.) absolutely will beat the naive answer because it will get rid of needless DOM updates. And it will do that without you having to do caching everywhere, because it's all done in one place at the lowest level before hitting the page. I'd love to see the horrible abomination of hand DOM updates that can magically beat a large React app.
edit: Just noticed this wasn't a reply to me, but I think the points I raise here are still fairly valid, if I'm understanding your reply correctly. Sorry if that was confusing.
Yeah, we're agreeing :) "Real DOM" can be just as fast if you do all the work React does by hand, but it's bound to be a mess - resulting in the programmer making mistakes that makes it slower.
> significantly nicer to code for than DOM binding
There are other ways to code this nicely, but _those_ are slower than virtual DOM. Real DOM _can_ indeed easily be faster, but that's not nearly as nice to program for.