You can use React to render static websites. You get the nice component model and the speed of static content. You can take a look at the react native[1][2] website for an example.
We've got our entire marketing site statically rendered. Looking forward to react 15, should get rid of lots of "data-reactid"s which should shave a bit off of the size of the rendered html.
You can actually do that at the moment with ReactDOMServer.renderToStaticMarkup(), which doesn't create any react-ids (but can't be used later by React on the client)
The chain of build steps is quite complex though... but hey, if it works...