I've been working with React for years now, over several large projects. I still feel like I'm not used to it, and I still hate it. That's not normal.

We need to either figure out how to do this shit with mutable data structures, or we need a new language that's immutable by default.

ImmutableJS blows chunks. Yeah it "saves" code until you start doing the data transformation dance trying to figure out when and where to convert between plain JS objects and Immutable ones. Then you end up with some real ugly shit that'll trip up every new hire you walk through it (we use a higher order component that converts a component's Immutable props to regular objects, which incidentally is another import that like 800 unrelated files depend on...)

God help you if you don't use well commented code or Hungarian notation to differentiate between Immutable objects and regular ones. We all know how long good commenting practices last without thorough code reviews, and we all know how long those last in fast-moving environments, which is where React is most useful.

I guess a typed language would solve that. No, Flow and Typescript don't count.