[olfactory]

Well, FWIW js is not the most friendly language for functional programming. I'd argue that the trend toward immutable.js and redux occurred partly because rest/spread syntax was/is relatively confusing, and so immutable patterns without a library feel less elegant until one really groks the somewhat visually opaque semantics of the rest/spread syntax.

Redux also offered a simple approach to the "action bus" idea from Flux, but omitted first class async support, etc. React itself also somewhat overlooked async patterns, which created the idea that their absence was by design and so an additional (opinionated) library was appropriate.

In sum I'd argue that React actually fights against js quite a bit and that it will truly come into its own once reason gets more mindshare.

For those of us who invested heavily in react as all this was becoming clear (and being ironed out) I hope we learned enough to allow better decision making in the future.

Also, React has a few "on by default" performance enhancements that are a bit conceptually confusing and create something of a mismatch with the functional approach.

But still it's difficult (and unpleasant) to imagine the world without React.