React expects to own the DOM and that state is managed by pure functions. There are good reasons for this, but the consequences are that it's restricting how the web platform works and when something does not agree with it weird things can happen.
Is it bad? Sometimes. Is it the rest of the Web fault? I don't believe so.
If you are using React you are largely constraining yourself to work in the React model, not in the Web model. That might be fine, but it might also not be.
Maybe, but some groups are banking on you having "news fatigue". So maybe they don't feel that way. And doing it in spite of them is something that balances out my anxiety for me.
I can understand the point, and the fact that in virtual dom implementations you in general specify the state -> view mapping and don't need to distinguish between first render and updates.
However, practically and personally I find working with signals way simpler, and that is even without considering the debugging experience.
The biggest downside of knockout is that it parses the template from the dom, and the template is rendered as dom until first execution. Then that it eval it's bindings. I suppose tko should help with those issues but seems kinda dead.
Knockout reactivity primitives are also a lot more naive then modern signals implementations.