There’s a whole ecosystem of alternatives that have sprung up I have a feeling you haven’t tried (not MVVM or anything like that). Without appealing to any of them you aren’t convincing.
Even within the frontend world and not in React you have all sorts of new state systems and structures that are in my opinion far more intuitive, less code, less cross cutting concerns, easier to change and grow more naturally. The gist of it is either a global state store with cursors and namespaces (I like this less than most) or a global state system with state split out (see Recoil) or an entirely tree based reactive state system (see mobx-state-tree or mobx-store) or even just nesting reducers or any simple nesting state container (pure react, zustand). I’ve recently put together gqless[0] with a state system similar to recoil but simpler (sort of like use-atom). It’s wonderful.
Your data is a tree/graph, you app is a tree, your file system is a tree, everything matches. You just slot in state with corresponding actions and at the level of the view hierarchy where it first becomes relevant (router at top, view controllers are spread in the middle layers however needed, and leafs get their own state as needed). And all data level things stay up in the graph, which I guess you could argue is an M sitting above it all, the VC are blurred together with more C at the top of the tree and pure V at the leafs. Even styling is all encapsulated where it’s used. Each piece is a lego block that can be moved around. And yes, it works, and works well, even without all the handlebars of Rails.
Wouldn’t dream of going back. It’s perhaps not a mature enough ecosystem for most to navigate their way to getting a good DX on a stack like that. Many pieces have rough edges if you don’t know what to avoid, it’s not like these huge mature frameworks that keep you away from scary stuff but also box you into a rigid structure. But of course it means you can do all sorts of things unimaginable in MVC land.