Sadly not. I did find this article too while searching for what I remember. It is a close match in so many ways, but also not quite.

I remember the article very much taking the approach that you've never heard of React before, and walking through a series of problems and discoveries like "oh, what if we just render the state to the DOM every frame? let's see how that works".

Almost like a "you could have invented React" kind of vibe. I think there was a button-counter demo app.