[davnicwil]

> just use markup and sprinkle a bit of js on top if you must

My perspective is of React as a templating engine for markup that allows you to add behaviour on top as you need. So in a sense, exactly what you've said.

It's good at this because it's all done seamlessly in the same language with hardly any magic or conventions they have invented. It's just javascript. It also has a rendering model that's extremely simple to reason about when updates happen.

You can build something as complicated or as simple as you want with that, of course, but React doesn't care if you do. That's up to you to decide. React can be 'just' a static markup template engine running at build time (my own blog is built this way!), a server-only template engine, little bits of behaviour sprinkled in on the client to isolated parts of the page, all the way up to a full blown client application with an arbitrary level of complexity.