First and foremost, Skate is a web component library designed to give you an augmentation of the specs focusing on a functional rendering pipeline and clean property / attribute semantics. It's about a tenth the size of just React itself, doesn't require any extras and utilises both custom elements and shadow DOM out of the box.
React is nice, and if you're can't invest the time to learn something new, Standalone is definitely a good choice. That said, the time it takes to learn Standalone you could have probably learned Skate. In my opinion, right tool, right job; hammer principle etc :)
Would be interested to see what jpnelson thinks as well.