I have had other people tell me this because they perceived state management as a challenging problem to solve. That is true of the big frameworks, but otherwise state management is a ridiculously straightforward problem easily solved.
React came to be because folks at Facabook couldn't get the label displaying unread notifications always to display correct value. This seems like ridiculously straightforward problem easily solved. Yet still many websites and applications today struggle with that.
I stopped watching the moment the speaker correlated imperative code to fragility. All code is inherently fragile. The only thing that makes code durable is not failing. Failure can be minimized by separating code into portable units that do nothing more than achieve a singular purpose.
Secondly, they kept talking about this creeping complexity in their code base of about 8 lines of code. 8 lines is still ridiculously tiny. I suspect their actual concern is that the code did multiple things like decrementing a number and modifying a state. I understand this was before TypeScript where execution can be planned against an interface, but I still would have created an object that stores all the relevant data they need to modify on each interaction.
Apparently you are smarter than the team that created the library that spontaneously taken over nearly entire field of front-end development. Good for you!
Its like comparing your car to a Kia Soul as opposed to a Bugatti or McLaren. It not a comparison of what's awesome. Its a comparison against that thing in common use. It doesn't take much to be better than that.
