Hi @Bryson_Cale, welcome to the Streamlit community!
Our launch article covers some of your questions:
In short, the top-down model vs. the callback model of interaction really depends on the userās background. As you mention, youāve experienced the event-driven experience first, so it makes sense to you. In contrast, Streamlit hypothesized that ādata scientistsā (however defined) might be more used to the reproducible research workflow, where you run your script top to bottom each time to ensure there is no hidden state or other oddities. In that sense, understanding the code is a matter of working top to bottom and tracing how things are calculated.
Neither is necessarily better, and of course Flask and any of the other Python web technologies are great open-source projects in their own right. Streamlit resonates with a certain group of users who have either experienced event-driven programming and donāt like it, or who start with the Streamlit model after using the REPL/notebook style programming and really enjoy how fast and linear it is to get started quickly using Streamlit.
Iād love to hear from other people in the community why they like Streamlit, obviously the employees and developers of Streamlit are going to be pretty biased 