> The Backbone code is brutally honest about what it's doing. An event fires, a handler runs, you build some HTML, you put it in the DOM. It's verbose, sure, but there's no mystery. A junior developer can trace exactly what happens and when. The mental model is straightforward: "when this happens, do this."
> The React code hides a lot. And once you move past simple examples, you hit problems that don't make sense until you understand React's internals.
I relate to this a lot. I have had to read these two very large articles multiple times to calcify my mental model for understanding exactly _when_ react does something and _why_ it did or did not.
https://overreacted.io/a-complete-guide-to-useeffect/https://blog.isquaredsoftware.com/2020/05/blogged-answers-a-...
Backbone was also my first framework that I haven’t touched in over 10 years, but looking at the code examples from the article I completely understood what was going on.