There's a lot of comments in here addressing some of the conceptual misunderstandings of "how to use react" (i.e. "use immutable.js", etc). I started writing React within the last year and, while I still find parts of it strange, I've found its real strength comes from the fact that it's easy to reason about, particularly at scale. In a large project, I don't find myself digging around the codebase looking for the place where event listeners are being bound, or where a piece of the DOM is getting mutated. The unidirectional flow of data makes it very easy to jump into a piece of an app.
It's not without its complexities, however. Mainly:
1. using JSX, instead of a more transparent templating language, means people with less technical knowledge (i.e. product designers) have a higher barrier to entry when trying to make simple UI changes (I'm looking at you, `className`).
2. it is unclear at times whether a component should have its properties passed in directly from state through `mapStateToProps`, or from a parent component through `props`.
3. there does seem to be an tiring amount of boilerplate when adding a new piece of interaction to a component (an action, an action type, a reducer case, and usually a piece of state all need to be added).
4. to a newcomer, the benefits of immutable.js are apparent, but the benefits of a memoizing layer like reselect.js were less obvious. When you're still trying to wrap your head around How To Write React Things™, it's not apparent that you'd even need memoization ("isn't React supposed to be good at diffing stuff?" you ask yourself after watching large pieces of your app redraw itself over and over).
I'm curious to hear how people deal with these particular issues. React was one of the more useful tools I learned about this year, and I'd love to see the process for newcomers to React become less frustrating.
Edit: formatting