Someone else asked that same question on Reddit [0], and Dan pointed out the paragraph in the post that answers it :
> One other possible heuristic could be to check for presence of a render method on the prototype. However, at the time it wasn’t clear how the component API would evolve. Every check has a cost so we wouldn’t want to add more than one. This would also not work if render was defined as an instance method, such as with the class property syntax.
> One other possible heuristic could be to check for presence of a render method on the prototype. However, at the time it wasn’t clear how the component API would evolve. Every check has a cost so we wouldn’t want to add more than one. This would also not work if render was defined as an instance method, such as with the class property syntax.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/reactjs/comments/a2j6xk/how_does_re...