Sidney Alcantara who works on Firetable, a product which features a data grid and an adjacent side drawer. When clicking a cell in the table, the side drawer opens with info about the current cell. Initially they lifted up the state, but that caused performance issues:
The problem was whenever the user selected a cell or opened the side drawer, the update to this global context would cause the entire app to re-render. This included the main table component, which could have dozens of cells displayed at a time, each with its own editor component. This would result in a render time of around 650 ms(!), long enough to see a visible delay in the side drawer’s open animation.
After exploring to split the context, or resort to useMemo/React.memo they settled on useRef to solve this.
Good use-case and detailed write-up!