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Well, i've always been a fan of the island architecture that effectively mounts root nodes as little islands of isolated state, yes.

Mainly this avoids the hell that global state SPA patterns produce: redux, reducer patterns in general, and 8 thousand context providers.

I do think there's use cases that warrant global in-memory state, but it's such a pain in the ass to maintain and evolve, i'd always plan against it. Every html node in your app does not need to know about literally everything going on and react instantly to it. it just doesn't.

Just make another page!

Also: so the islands pattern can be as fancy or rudimentary as desired. they can bootstrap themselves via async endpoints, they can be shipped as web components even, or they can be static, pre-hydrated in some manner.

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The islands pattern is underrated for maintainability. I've found the biggest win isn't even the state isolation — it's that each island can have a completely independent upgrade path. You can rewrite one island from React to vanilla JS (or whatever comes next) without touching anything else.

The global state SPA pattern fails for a more fundamental reason than just being painful to maintain: it creates an implicit contract between every component in the app. Change one reducer and you're debugging side effects three layers away. Islands make the contract explicit — each one owns its data, full stop.

The one gotcha I've hit is cross-island communication. PostMessage works but gets messy. Custom events on a shared DOM ancestor end up being the cleanest pattern for the rare cases where islands genuinely need to coordinate.

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With signals you can avoid the prop drilling. I think signals can help a lot with this approach
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I think the parent wants to separate the V from the M/C. If you smuggle signals inside of components to avoid prop drilling, you would be coupling the M/C and the V. I suppose that's not what the parent has in mind.
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