It's funny because at the end of the day it's still all just instructions on a CPU. Computers essentially haven't changed in half a century. What the biggest change between then and now? Multi-core processors?
I'd say the computer architecture can vary _greatly_ and there are a bunch of cores in modern SOC's that kind of break the assumption of how a computer works. I recently listened to this:
Cache coherence, accelerators, various takes on pipelining, ISA extensions. There are many many things that change all the time.
Not even touching the SW glue stuff that changes. I don't know the history of react and what is going on in modern browsers, but I suspect there are OS constraints, evolving web standards, extra capabilities, evolving browsers that shape and force the framework to adapt. I am doubtful people change it just for the sake of it.
We are talking about programming computers. What the CPU does once it gets instructions is mostly irrelevant to the programmer. The act of programming is still just building big lists of instructions to feed to a CPU so why has the programming stack grown to such a massive precarious bloated pile of abstraction that gets in my way? Every fancy schmancy language you can think of still just comes down to feeding the same instructions to a hungry CPU.
That's the thing, you have layers upon layers of stuff that run on the computer. You have a runtime of the language, many many abstractions of interacting with the various capability of the system, a ABI to the OS, an ISA. These things vary and you need to account somehow for these variation. And the changes in the lowest layers percolate through.
Not to mention that the computer is actually very very different than what you imagine.
I say this not to make excuses for react, again I don't know that ecosystem. I spend most of my time writing firmware and low level drivers. And I see during my work the wide array of capabilities and approaches these systems have. They are not an homogeneous bunch.
I'd say GPUs and the things descended from them and how they're being used now is a pretty big development.
You can still be reductionist about it, but it feels materially different from the mundane calculations and algorithms that sprung to mind when I read your post.
