100% agree and it makes me try and handle state in a similar way even in plain Javascript without any libraries.

Will check out take-home more when I get a chance, I did see some murmurs on the Elm mailing list of how it would be easy to do server side rendering. What impressed me about React's was that I could just call a function and get the HTML as a string. My project is statically generated so that was exactly what I needed.