[diggan]

React itself doesn't have any way of "listening" to events, so the data is only flowing in one direction always. Redux et al introduces more things on top of that, where you can fire off events ("Actions" in Redux terms) that react/trigger other events, but doesn't really have anything to do with React itself.

Then that some people make React components change state on render/mount/update, is a different failure, but not really a failure of React as much as a failure of the one using React.

But in general no, React doesn't really prevent you from having a component updating and re-rendering because some state changed, and because of that, changes the state again and thus re-renders again, forever.