When Render No Longer Owns the Entire Data Flow (opens in new tab)

In frontend development, it is very easy to think of data flow and rendering as the same thing. After all, for most applications, the final goal is to display data on the screen. Data comes back from an API, gets written into state, the component re-renders, and the UI updates. This path is so familiar that we often unconsciously assume: The purpose of data changes is to trigger render. But as an application scales, this assumption begins to crack. Data flow does not exist exclusively to serv...