Sadly not. I did find this article too while searching for what I remember. It is a close match in so many ways, but also not quite.
I remember the article very much taking the approach that you've never heard of React before, and walking through a series of problems and discoveries like "oh, what if we just render the state to the DOM every frame? let's see how that works".
Almost like a "you could have invented React" kind of vibe. I think there was a button-counter demo app.
Not a live preview and not a button-counter demo at the end, but the overall structure and the whole O(n) vs O(n^2) argumentation was in this blog post from a now defunct domain. Maybe this is what you were looking for:
This definitely looks different, and I don't recall seeing this before. But this is a great post! It communicates some of the very important ideas in a straightforward way. Thanks!
Another one that seems so close that it makes me think I imagined the one I'm looking for, and this is actually what I read. Thanks for trying - it's not causing me to say eureka! but it is close.
