I just read the signals proposal and was not impressed. There is a lot group thought in JavaScript, in Java too but more in JavaScript, around standardizing convenience based upon knowingly bad decisions from convenience abstractions.
Managing and updating the DOM is stupid simple and that simplicity has nothing to do with state, which a fully separate yet equally simplistic concern. That is something UI frameworks most commonly fail at horribly with a mountain of highly complex state bullshit that is forced on everything. But because framework people cannot architect original applications at any level these failures become indefensible standards enshrined by the most insecure among us.
I think he meant examples where "Managing and updating the DOM is stupid simple." The consensus here seems to be that updating the DOM is a difficult problem. It would be nice to have counter-examples.
I am sure it is hard if you have never written an application without React, jQuery, whatever before. That doesn't make it hard though. It just means its something, only at present, uncomfortable.
Here is how I do it. This is all the front end code for a large personal project.
My observation is that no matter how complicated and large the application gets anything that ultimately runs in the browser scales in size disproportionately slower in the browser code than elsewhere. This remains true no matter how much of the instruction set you intentionally try to put into the browser. That said, why even bother with this framework bullshit in the first place if the code it abstracts is never the primary problem in any given application? The larger the application gets the less significant the browser portion of that code becomes as a percentage of total application size.
Managing and updating the DOM is stupid simple and that simplicity has nothing to do with state, which a fully separate yet equally simplistic concern. That is something UI frameworks most commonly fail at horribly with a mountain of highly complex state bullshit that is forced on everything. But because framework people cannot architect original applications at any level these failures become indefensible standards enshrined by the most insecure among us.