The problem in two way data binding (MVVM) and MVC is that they have many to many dependency between models and views . A model can update a view which can update a model which can update another model and there can be a infinite loop of cascading updates.

In a talk Jing Chen ( Creater of flux ) said - "There is just an explosion of command flows, and it is hard to tell if there is any infinite loop that might be causing a cascading effect."

In unidirectional data flow action updates stores which updates views . So if there is a error it would be easy to track which action caused it . Unidirectional data flow is more predictable .

Basically what Mayank said. I have nothing more to add on that level just want to give a concrete example with Angular. Angular became super-popular exactly because of it's two-way binding. However it brings a lot of performance problems.

When you think about it for a bit. How can a framework know that a value has changed? Really it boils down to 2 ways. You can do it through a setter, which is already half-way towards unidirectional data flow...or you can do dirty checking. Dirty checking means constant checking if the value has changed at any point when it could have changed. That's a ton of work all the time and most of it is pointless.

This is why Angular apps start becoming sluggish when you hit ~ 2000 bindings on a page. This sounds like a huge number but it doesn't take much to get there. Almost any medium sized app will easily hit 2000.