[always_good]

I think you need to take some personal responsibility here for not knowing how Javascript works.

That you've written so much indicates to me that you expect other people (like a framework's documentation) to introduce you to every language idiosyncrasy in any place you happen to be reading.

That's not what I want people to expect from me as a professional. People should be able to expect me to credentialize in the domain at hand.

[vanderZwan]

I sincerely hope you never have and never will work in education, or in any way have to teach others how something works.

[amk_]

Still, it isn't entirely obvious under what conditions the methods of a React Component class are going to be called. For all you know they might always be called against the instance.