Explore the innovative rendering architecture of React, the JavaScript library for building user interfaces developed by Facebook and Instagram, in this 36-minute conference talk from OSCON 2014. Delve into the evolution of React's architecture, starting from string concatenation in 2004 and progressing through custom tags, naive approaches, node reuse, and old school methods. Learn about children-by-children rendering, identity management, and the groundbreaking Virtual DOM concept. Discover how React implements batching and subtree re-rendering for improved performance. Gain insights into the crucial shouldComponentUpdate? method and its role in optimizing React applications.