Earlier quoted context omitted.
Could you expand on what you mean by ceremony and state management tricks ? From my use of Redux there is a bit of set up cost in making the types and actions and getting the store into the components that need it, is that what you're referring to ?
Yeah that and then also the stuff you have to do to get async working like redux-thunk and redux-saga. I haven't actually built anything with these yet so maybe in practice it's ok but it definitely looks ugly.
It's been my experience that learning redux without a teacher takes some time if you aren't familiar with the one-way data flow mindset. If you have someone to pair with for a couple days, you'll be off to the races very quickly.
That said, I think redux itself is too barebones. EVERY redux app uses the thunk middleware (even the official docs spend a long time on it) and most find themselves recreating a multiple dispatch one too. If 95+% of your users need the same extension, then it's not really an extension (and in this case, both together are less than 15 lines of code).