My thoughts exactly!
The amount of things you need to know in order to use react and redux is ridiculously low.
You're basically just composing functions of two types "(state, action) => state" , and "state" => html.
The boilerplate consists of a few functions (really mostly createStore and connect) that are incredibly well documented.
There's almost nothing to understand and redux itself is almost not a lib (only 318 LOC). The whole thing is a pattern and redux is just a small, very well written key component of the pattern.
When people debate redux they debate about programming, not about a tool. That's why it's interesting and why it will never end.