Same here. Learning React for me was pretty simple. I think many get confused as to what React is and what it isn't. Like many view or template libraries, a React "app" is really just a function that takes properties and outputs markup. In React's case, there's a little more behind-the-scenes magic as to when changes propagate to the DOM, but the concept is still very similar. React isn't MVC/MVVM/MV*/etc, it just manages the view layer. With React, you also get the ability to render server-side and target other platforms such as iOS, Android, etc.

Redux on the other hand was a little more confusing for me to learn (the concept makes complete sense, it's the implementation and debugging that gets confusing). The great thing about Redux is that you don't have to use it or learn it. The React ecosystem is pretty well decoupled so you can choose how you want to manage state and async tasks. That is it's biggest selling point for me personally.

My experience with front-end frameworks started with Backbone + a ton of jQuery to AngularJS to React (with many different state management libraries). I found that Backbone didn't really provide much on top of jQuery + lodash/underscore, but I liked that it didn't make too many decisions for you. Angular (v1) on the other hand, forces you into some unconventional patterns (ie: the whole service vs factory fiasco and it's own dependency management system). It's fine if you aren't using a separate dependency management library (or ESM), but if you are, you have to declare dependencies twice. Angular 2/4/5/whatever-arbitrary-number-they-are-on-now has been way more confusing for me to learn as they make you learn their own templating language for things like loops, control flow, etc and still have some weird patterns around dependency injection. JSX is a lot simpler if you know basic JS. React seems to have the least amount of boilerplate code as well especially if you make use of functional components.