React 19.3 ViewTransition: Animate State Without Losing It

You wire up a photo grid. Click a thumbnail, it should morph smoothly into a full detail view — the kind of transition Google Photos and Instagram have trained everyone to expect. You already know the browser can do this for free: the native View Transitions API wraps a DOM update in document.startViewTransition(), tags the old and new elements with a shared view-transition-name, and the browser tweens between them. You wire it up. It works beautifully — right up until the thumbnail lives inside a filtered, paginated React list, and the click also has to update selectedId state, close a search