I know, that's why I said, that when you hit things like that (state that is too big to pull onto the client at once, and/or displayed at once), React's (and I guess a lot of other immutablity-based frameworks') dataflow management stops being magic, and you have to start tending to it.

Which usually means this model loses all advantages compared to simple MVC, or imperative systems, and at worst, becomes another headache as implementation details start leaking.

I guess my point was that it doesn't matter whether your framework/library is immutable/mutable/retained/functional/MVC/MVVM or whatever. You're hitting platform limitations one way or another.

But the rest of your app still gets the simplicity of a declarative programming model.

Imo that's a rather nihilistic take. My personal opinion is that despite ungodly amount of money invested, the web has changed very little from the 'static website +maybe jQuery' days - 90% of the content people consume is static, with very little interactivity, that would be perfectly captured by the 'script' nature of Javascript (think 10 line scripts, like 'if hovered, play live preview of video'). Even that interactivity is mostly driven by data that needs to be fetched from the server.

'Web Apps' are the exception, and are more or less completely alien to the rest of the content, think 'flash games' or 'google maps' - which have become 'wasm games on unity on itch.io'.

Having a mostly static web for the former, and the ability to basically almost whatever would be for the best.

Speaking of Flash, the 'cross section' of the two - websites with tons of interactivity and flashy animation have almost disappeared.

The web of today is an unhappy compromise of mediocrity and low expectations.