To me it was not only that as I didn't do games or highly interactive UI's where DOM updates would really matter but it freed me from the burden of ad-hoc updating with jquery as everybody was used to. Unless you had some framework or had invented ways to centrally store state chances are your code was all over the place.
I tried 2-way binding in ExtJS and it seemed to work well at first then I started adding more and more binds to the component and at certain point performance just tanked.
And it was after I started with React already so I just didn't bother to investigate, issue actually was some kind of loop being formed and things aborting due to hitting limits. Which I guess means I used it somewhat incorrectly but I never had that issue with react.
I tried 2-way binding in ExtJS and it seemed to work well at first then I started adding more and more binds to the component and at certain point performance just tanked.
And it was after I started with React already so I just didn't bother to investigate, issue actually was some kind of loop being formed and things aborting due to hitting limits. Which I guess means I used it somewhat incorrectly but I never had that issue with react.