When React first burst onto the scene, its primary innovation was the Virtual DOM: instead of having to manually make sure the DOM is in sync with the actual application state, you'd just recreate a representation of the full DOM on every state change, and React would then update the actual DOM with exactly the changes needed to make it match. React components were simply a function of the application state, and the main benefit of that, as was the slogan at the time, is that it makes them ea...
