[linkmotif]

React (or similar library) makes sense whenever you want to have the ability to reason easily about state in your UI application. So if your UI accumulates any kind of user-introduced state, like text input, some kind of toggle, React provides a very pleasant mental model.

[s_kilk]

But what the hell kind of state is involved in rendering a static page of text with a few images?

[danielharrison]

Initial page load might be marginally slower, although it's not hard to thrown down the bare minimum and lazy load the rest, but every subsequent page load will be faster and much less intrusive.

I'd say react is a perfect fit for this type of thing. A basic news site it might be, but there's a lot more going on under the hood than you'd imagine.

[linkmotif]

My experience has been that this kind of thing is very rare.