Suspense is a symptom

This post is part of a series on Inglorious Web. You can start from the beginning, or read it standalone — the argument here is self-contained. Inglorious Web didn't start as a React alternative. It started as a game engine. I wanted to build a cool JavaScript game engine — something that could handle hundreds of entities updating at 60 frames per second, with clean state management, deterministic event handling, and no magic. The state manager that emerged from that work was general enough that I started using it for web apps too. And once it was powering web UIs, the React rendering layer started feeling like the wrong tool: too heavy, too coupled, too opinionated about who owns state. I replaced it with lit-html and followed the logic all the way through. Game engines have been solving high-frequency state updates with heterogeneous objects for decades — under far stricter performance constraints than any web UI. They never needed a component hierarchy. They never needed to fire RES