This project started from exactly there too until I couldn't push react-pdf any further. The MORE/CONT'D feature required by screenplay was impossible to implement with react-pdf's black box so I had to write my own.
Its a huge issue in all of those also. It just presents itself differently. JSP -- every click has to post or query param change re-renders the page. This gets hugely cumbersum with tree stateor anything other than basic switches. In a lot of ways its the one way data flow we all want in react. For a lot of pages its easy. Same with React, However complex state is so difficult to do in JSP you really can't write the apps we write today.
I would say React's state management is its great success, rather than its `functionalness` or its reactivity. No other UI framework (QT|WinForms|MOTIF|GTK) really ever handled state well.
This is spot on. I've been slowly switching from class based React to hooks based with Suspense, and a couple of things have become super clear.
1) hooks are magical, finicky, abstraction that don't play well with promises. They save code at a cost of understandability, subtlety, and new rules. I wrote a ton of Perl, and fundamentally believe that 1 line is better than 2 lines, weirdly hooks are making me rethink that belief.
2) Throwing promises is super tricky... I just wrote a class based component to cache the results of a hook, so I could wrap it into a function that would throw. I am not proud. 5 layers of abstraction needed where the same thing in a class based structure would be 2.
3) The hard part of UI is and always will be state. React (initially) got it mostly right. Redux was a detour, and this seems a much better way forward.
