[LaGrange]

So d3 is actually a _set_ of libraries, of various kind, most of which happen to be useful for data visualisation. Through its richness, there's a good chance that at least _some_ of those libraries will fit your use case well enough. There's nothing stopping you from not using it, and in fact my most recent work was with Canvas, and the only thing I used was d3-scale, which aids mapping datasets into number ranges and selecting ticks.

In another case I might not care about it, but use d3-selection, a mechanism for creating a data-driven DOM tree — but it's pretty clear that you can achieve similar mechanics with React.

Importantly, you don't have to pull the whole thing into your dependencies just because you use a bit of it, and it's light on own dependencies. So just using a small subset of functionality is "cheap."