This is a huge revelation indeed! Android itself had this epiphany a couple years back when they released the RecyclerView, which is their abstraction over this exact idea of "recycling" UI views and rebinding them new data, rather than creating views explicitly for their data. It took me a while to understand the pattern myself, but I had the same moment as you when this idea finally clicked for me!
This is a huge revelation indeed! Android itself had this epiphany a couple years back when they released the RecyclerView, which is their abstraction over this exact idea of "recycling" UI views and rebinding them new data, rather than creating views explicitly for their data. It took me a while to understand the pattern myself, but I had the same moment as you when this idea finally clicked for me!
Wow, it would be great to have an in-built abstraction for this.