Thanks for the feedback. We decided early on against having a “non-reactive” mode. It would negate many of our core benefits (including importing from other notebooks), and it would also lead to a fragmented ecosystem — if someone shared a notebook with you, your experience with it would depend on whether it was executed in “reactive” or “non-reactive” mode. Still I appreciate the kind words about our editor and file format, and am sorry we can’t accommodate your use case.
We describe why we opted against “disabling” the graph at the end of this blog: https://marimo.io/blog/lessons-learned