React has always been about the Virtual DOM. A nice way to render HTML (and some of SVG and maybe some Web Components). Although there's also react-art, react-three, react-canvas, react-curses... Oh, and react-native! Even if you bottom out at HTML, most of what React does really well is rendering to OTHER React components. Meanwhile most projects still try to retrofit our needs into HTML and CSS primitives. I'll talk about why the DOM is flawed and how it is becoming a second-class citizen in the land of React apps.