I agree "UI = f(state)" rocks. That was the one thing React got right. But they never worked out state management, other than to kick off the Flux monstrosity that Redux ran with, and every other UI I can find.
As for what I call the "Lego model" of UI construction, while definitely off-putting, I think the "why" is prolly "simplicity thru decomposition". So we do a bit more typing but have a dead simple approach to building our UIs.
The nice thing about any Lisp with its macro capabilities is that we can wrap sth like Flutter to produce a library that remains Flutter, but hides the noise.
ClojureDart offers a so-called "widget" macro, and my Matrix library goes a different way, making every constructor such as "scaffold" into a friendlier macro.
As for what I call the "Lego model" of UI construction, while definitely off-putting, I think the "why" is prolly "simplicity thru decomposition". So we do a bit more typing but have a dead simple approach to building our UIs.
The nice thing about any Lisp with its macro capabilities is that we can wrap sth like Flutter to produce a library that remains Flutter, but hides the noise.
ClojureDart offers a so-called "widget" macro, and my Matrix library goes a different way, making every constructor such as "scaffold" into a friendlier macro.