One project I worked on was a BI tool with a fair amount of complex state. Before we introduced react we were using backbone, event listeners, and managing dom state ourselves. With react we made it declarative, which simplified things.
Another project was an email client with a lot of complex state and caching. That started with and continued to use react so I don’t have a direct performance comparison. But again, managing the state manual would have been a nightmare.
Thanks in particular for the second example: it's a precise idea which can be studied (the former still is too abstract).
> managing the state manually would have been a nightmare
Now, of course, the annoying follow-up question would be "why?". For sure, there are poor ways to handle complex states without React, but that doesn't mean it's impossible to do it fairly well either.
For example, a divide and conquer strategy might make the situation less miserable already: associate "components" (DOM nodes) to relevant portions of the state only. But it's still too difficult to get a clear idea without actual code (hence my original question: most of the discussions about this are either objectively too hypothetical because they deal with complex/private codebases, or unconvincing toys)
One project I worked on was a BI tool with a fair amount of complex state. Before we introduced react we were using backbone, event listeners, and managing dom state ourselves. With react we made it declarative, which simplified things.
Another project was an email client with a lot of complex state and caching. That started with and continued to use react so I don’t have a direct performance comparison. But again, managing the state manual would have been a nightmare.