OP here. Perhaps you overlooked my comment in the intro that my spike solution was the first few screens of my real-world app? The code samples in the article are distilled/simplified from the spike solutions.

My React spike became my real app, and structurally looks pretty much the same (even 2 months of dev later). If you think there are some important concerns that I left out (and I'm sure there are), please be specific so that I/we can learn.