Out of curiosity, what do you usually use on the backend?
Since it only cares about UI, React is obviously not opinionated about your backend/server environment unless you're trying to do server rendering (then you need something in your stack capable of executing JS).
The server-rendered page is then instanced in the browser and differential rendering can be performed. I have been interested in doing this concept using React but have decided to prototype with a simpler implementation called Incremental DOM.
My project is at github.com/tmzt/incrust.
Nice project!