Do you mean subscribing to events/callbacks, manually managing object lifecycle, manually inserting list elements, keeping it in sync with the state, etc, etc. Because that was all friggen horrible. Maybe new approaches could make it less horrible, but there is no way I’d go back to what it was like before React. If anything, I want everything to be more reactive, more like immediate mode rendering.
They still nail "state" to element trees, which creates unbenchmarkable but real update costs. Svelte does better than react, but only within the same paradigm.
Can you describe what you mean by that a bit more? As I understand it, with the new signals-based system in Svelte, updating data directly updates the DOM.