[vosper]

OTOH I'd be amazed if no-one's built an SPA in production with React and nothing else from the React ecosystem. What would be so hard about that? You can totally use it as just a view layer, if that's what you want to do. Granted, you probably use other non-React libraries, but that's not what we're talking about.

[tptacek]

You can also have a "view layer", some control flow behavior in simple higher-order components, and then stores and actions that are simple plain-ol'-Javascript without needing a framework dep. The idea that a React app without Redux and react-router must simply be a brainless view layer is reductive and misleading.