[kwood]

I was in quite the same situation, Angular 1.x was quite hard to grok at first. But React just "clicked" instantly.

For integration with Rails, I found https://github.com/reactjs/react-rails to be quite useful. It integrates the Babel transformer for JSX into the asset pipeline and brings a couple of helper functions, so no additional setup needed.

You start writing your components, "mount" them via the helpers in standard .erb templates (or even without the template directly from a controller action), done.