No, of course. Back in 2000 we loved handling our own window.__mynamespace variables. The world was so much better with document.forms[0].submit. Those beautiful days of document.write, document.elementid.property. I’m nostalgic.
There were thousands of pre-react desktop apps on frameworks from turbovision to *tk to appkit and not a single one of them mismanaged focus because of a missing “key” or required to “update state through slicing an array” nonsense. This old pain you feel is historically self-inflicted and doesn’t exist elsewhere.
I made a bunch of apps and user interfaces with these frameworks myself. It was natural and straightforward. Sometimes it could get clunky and hack-y due to limitations, but usually it was the level when a whole react team would be fired for economical reasons (think of multi-tab forms with settings, dialogs, master-details, complex table input, etc).
Edit: “slicing”
Frankly, Flex did s lot of things right. The layout and the default widget library was top notch. The grid was a killer feature. The IDE was really helpful.