mvc-router

Try mvc-router, see here: https://github.com/wisercoder/mvc-router/tree/master/DemoApp... React was originally meant to be the 'V' in MVC. You can still use it that way and React becomes very simple when you only use it for UI. Why do data fetching in a React component?

You don't need a large framework to build a maintainable, efficient web app. Here's an example: https://github.com/wisercoder/eureka/tree/master/webapp It uses two 500-line libraries: This 500-line lib lets you use TSX syntax without React: https://github.com/wisercoder/uibuilder This 500-line lib implements MVC routing: https://github.com/wisercoder/mvc-router

You are absolutely right; web development is unnecessarily complex when you use frameworks such as React. But there are alternatives! Here's an example application built without heavy frameworks. It is very maintainable and easy to understand: https://github.com/wisercoder/eureka It uses two 500-line libs: This is the component "framework", it is 500 lines: https://github.com/wisercoder/uibuilder This is the router, it is 500 lines: https://github.com/wisercoder/mvc-router

Here's an example of an application written without using heavy frameworks: https://github.com/wisercoder/eureka It uses two libs, 200 lines and 500 lines each: This lib for components: https://github.com/wisercoder/uibuilder And this one for routing (HTML5 history API): https://github.com/wisercoder/mvc-router React is overrated in my opinion. If your UI is mostly read-only then React works well. If it has simple interactivity then React still works well. But if you have components that manage their own interactivity then React breaks down. That's because such interactive components have state. When a component has state, and you want to update props then FB recommends replacing the component by changing the key. At that point you lose all benefits of React, including preservation of selection, scroll position, focus, etc.

To solve this problem you can use React with an MVC framework. See https://github.com/wisercoder/mvc-router