Thinking about going from React back to Backbone?

I often think back to how simple Backbone.js was.

You could read the entire source code quite easily. Debugging was easy. It was so simple you could write it yourself in fact.

A `View/Component` had a `model` property and a `render` function and that was essentially it. Views used data binding, so that you get nice fine-grained reactivity (in React this is a nightmare). You have full control of the performance too. I badly miss being able to manually manipulate HTML to get animations how I would like.

I never liked JSX either. I'd prefer to just use JSON. In React, I would always just pass JSON as a single prop like so: ``. The ternary conditionals inside JSX are ugly as hell too.

It's just way too hard to understand. You have to keep so many caveats and internals knowledge in your head to make something performant. And it's impossible to debug or step-through. It's simply not JavaScript. I remeber when people liked it because it's "just a library". It's really not. It's more comparable to an operating system, let alone a framework.

I think myself and others have just bought into it for so long that it feels impossible to leave. And things like write-once run-anywhere with React Native felt so appealing. And then there's Next.js and friends.

Was Backbone + jQuery really so bad? Am I forgetting anything?