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!

Probably. I have been doing this for a while.

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.

In case you want additional information about who was responsible and what were their motivations, competence and experience here's a documentary:

https://youtu.be/8pDqJVdNa44?si=kEhofuwlthON62xz