The React 2013 "Marketing Pitch"

When React was first introduced in 2013, the web development world was dominated by frameworks like jQuery, Backbone, and AngularJS. In those frameworks, developers had to manually update the browser DOM, or the framework would heavily slow down the browser by sweeping the entire real DOM on every change.

React's biggest selling point was the following:

Stop worrying about manual DOM updates. Just write your UI declaratively. The Virtual DOM will magically do the work of reducing renders.

To sell this idea simply to a skeptical developer audience, the creators packaged the message into:

We minimize rendering

It was a highly effective marketing pitch, even if it technically blurred the lines between the JavaScript render phase and the browser paint phase.

React Official Docs Change: -

The React Team Literally Changed the Docs to Fix This!

The confusion grew so massive that when the React team rewrote the official documentation from scratch (moving to the modern react.dev), they explicitly rewrote the guide to fix this exact misunderstanding.

If you look at the modern "Render and Commit" section of the official docs, they now explicitly separate the process into three distinct steps—Trigger, Render, and Commit—and they added an

Epilogue

Just for the browser:

Epilogue: Browser paint

After rendering is done and React updated the DOM, the browser will repaint the screen. Although this process is known as

browser rendering

, we'll refer to it as

painting

to avoid confusion throughout the docs.

They literally had to invent their own terminology "painting"

to stop developers from confusing React's in-memory calculations with actual browser screen updates!