[zuprau]

> React's biggest lasting contributions. Describing UI in a declarative way

I feel that AngularJS (v1) did that years before React, and maybe even other MVC frameworks before that.

I can't think of anything React brought in that earlier frameworks didn't already have in a form or another. Maybe hooks? Arguably the worst and least performant part of React.

It only popularized "HTML-in-JS" but that has always been possible via strings or file imports. Even template pre-compilation was part of Backbone or Ember (I don't remember which)

[brundolf]

> I feel that AngularJS (v1) did that years before React, and maybe even other MVC frameworks before that.

Angular markup lives in templates which are used to generate and update the UI, while React markup lives in expressions which evaluate to values. This is a subtle but key difference. I would argue React isn't even an MVC framework (though it sorta pretended to be one for a while)

[Izkata]

> I can't think of anything React brought in that earlier frameworks didn't already have in a form or another. Maybe hooks? Arguably the worst and least performant part of React.

The virtual DOM existed only in a library or two that you had to build around, before React made it into a useable framework. The whole "automatically figure out minimal DOM changes", especially things like reusing existing <input> elements so the user input doesn't vanish or the element lose focus, were pretty much brand-new when it came out.

[baja_blast]

React popularized and brought one way data flow, and Redux introduced centralized state which was a massive improvement over AngularJS.