I'm not sure I'd agree that those are examples of people fighting React though — using it on the client and server allows you to never duplicate markup you might have in a component with markup in a template, for example. The case for writing your entire UI in React is pretty strong actually, as it's just a matter of where you create the data to pass down to your tree of components: once, on the server for a complete page load, or incrementally and dynamically on the client.
There are some cases though where the component model feels strained — consider components that act as a pass-through for debouncing data, components that implement routing as a tree of routes and handlers, or components that perform data-fetching. Perhaps it's that the community hasn't found the right APIs for these higher-order components, but it's hard to argue against using React for a stateless tree of UI components.