I realized that I was confused with requestAnimationFrame, although some time ago I thought I understood how it works.

So what is the essence of my problem:

They say that requestAnimationFrame, namely its callback, will be called before the rendering stages, that is, calling requestAnimationFrame does not mean that the browser will run to execute the callback function passed to it right now.

However, if we take this code:

const run = () => {
  requestAnimationFrame((timeStamp) => {
    console.log(timestamp);
    requestAnimationFrame(run);
  })
};
run();

and if we run on a completely empty page, we will see how the timestamps will be printed in the console, but why if the page is completely empty, there is no reason to render. The reason?

Okay, let’s look at the specification, it says you need to wait for rendering opportunity before starting the task related to rendering, where our requestAnimationFrame will appear. But the code above should not be printed due to the lack of a rendering opportunity reason. Or is the reason exist?

An explanation is needed.